Morphosyntactic alignment

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In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between arguments—specifically, between the two arguments (in English, subject and object) of transitive verbs like the dog chased the cat, and the single argument of intransitive verbs like the cat ran away. English has a subject, which merges the more active argument of transitive verbs with the argument of intransitive verbs, leaving the object distinct; other languages may have different strategies, or, rarely, make no distinction at all. Distinctions may be made morphologically (through case and agreement), syntactically (through word order), or both.

Terminology

Arguments

Dixon (1994)

The following notations will be used to discuss the various types of alignment:^[1][2]

• S (from sole), the subject of an intransitive verb ;
• A (from agent), the subject of a transitive verb;
• O (from object), the object of a transitive verb. Some authors use the label P (from patient) for O.

Note that while the labels S, A, O, and P originally stood for subject, agent, object, and patient, respectively, the concepts of S, A, and O/P are distinct both from the grammatical relations and thematic relations. In other words, an A or S need not be an agent or subject, and an O need not be a patient.

In a nominative–accusative system, S and A are grouped together, contrasting O. In an ergative–absolutive system, S and O are one group and contrast with A. The English language represents a typical nominative–accusative system (accusative for short). The name derived from the nominative and accusative cases. Basque is an ergative–absolutive system (or simply ergative). The name stemmed from the ergative and absolutive cases. S is said to align with either A (as in English) or O (as in Basque) when they take the same form.

Bickel & Nichols (2009)

Listed below are argument roles used by Bickel and Nichols for the description of alignment types.^[3] Their taxonomy is based on semantic roles and valency (the number of arguments controlled by a predicate).

• S, the sole argument of a one-place predicate
• A, the more agent-like arguments of a two-place (A1) or three-place (A2) predicate
• O, the less agent-like argument of a two-place predicate
• G, the more goal-like argument of a three-place predicate
• T, the non-goal-like and non-agent-like argument of a three-place predicate

Locus of marking

The term locus refers to a location where the morphosyntactic marker reflecting the syntactic relations is situated. The markers may be located on the head of a phrase, a dependent, and both or none of them.^{[4][5][further explanation needed]}

Types of alignment

1. Yuman languages
   .
2. Basque
   .
3. Active–stative
   alignment treats the arguments of intransitive verbs like the A argument of transitives (like English) in some cases and like transitive O arguments (like Inuit) in other cases (S_a=A; S_o=O). For example, in Georgian, Mariamma imğera "Mary (-ma) sang", Mariam shares the same narrative case ending as in the transitive clause Mariamma c'erili dac'era "Mary (-ma) wrote the letter (-i)", while in Mariami iq'o Tbilisši revolutsiamde "Mary (-i) was in Tbilisi up to the revolution", Mariam shares the same case ending (-i) as the object of the transitive clause. Thus, the arguments of intransitive verbs are not uniform in its behaviour.
   The reasons for treating intransitive arguments like A or like O usually have a semantic basis. The particular criteria vary from language to language and may be either fixed for each verb or chosen by the speaker according to the degree of volition, control, or suffering of the participant or to the degree of sympathy that the speaker has for the participant.
4. voice, terms such as "agent trigger" or "actor focus" are increasingly used for the accusative type (S=A) and "patient trigger" or "undergoer focus" for the ergative type (S=O). (The terms with "trigger" may be preferred over those with "focus" because these are not focus systems either; morphological alignment has a long history of confused terminology). Patient-trigger alignment is the default in most of these languages. For either alignment, two core cases are used (unlike passive and antipassive voice, which have only one), but the same morphology is used for the "nominative" of the agent-trigger alignment and the "absolutive" of the patient-trigger alignment so there is a total of just three core cases: common S/A/O (usually called nominative, or less ambiguously direct), ergative A, and accusative O. Some Austronesianists argue that these languages have four alignments, with additional "voices" that mark a locative or benefactive
   with the direct case, but most maintain that these are not core arguments and thus not basic to the system.
5. Direct alignment: very few languages make no distinction among agent, patient, and intransitive arguments, leaving the hearer to rely entirely on context and common sense to figure them out. This S/A/O case is called direct, as it sometimes is in Austronesian alignment.
6. Tripartite alignment uses a separate case or syntax for each argument,^[6] which are conventionally called the accusative case, the intransitive case, and the ergative case. The Nez Perce language
   is a notable example.
7. Iranian languages, such as Rushani
   , distinguish only transitivity (in the past tense), using a transitive case for both A and O, and an intransitive case for S. That is sometimes called a double-oblique system, as the transitive case is equivalent to the accusative in the non-past tense.