User:Elector Dark/Morphosyntactic Alignment

In linguistics, the general meaning of morphosyntactic alignment is that of the relations between the core arguments of intransitive and monotransitive sentences.

The three categories distinguished are the  S ubject, the  P atient and the  A gent. Traditionally divided into five basic combination of cases, there are also several less clear-cut alignments of these arguments.

The distinctions can be made morphologically, syntactically, or, where case-marking is relatively young or at the end of its life, both ways. There are no instances of a language aligning to only one of the alignments, and oftentimes other alignments are mixed in; we can draw conclusions and tendencies nonetheless.

Basic Division
The basic divisions of morphosyntactic alignments are the following:

Direct
The direct morphosyntactic alignment is the most common MSA (acronym) in the world, taking around half of the world's languages. In essence, the direct alignment makes no distinction between any of the three beforementioned categores, neither syntactically nor morphologically.

While many of the world's languages are categorised as direct-marking based on a lack of an overt morphological system on the nouns that shows relations, many are, in fact, not actually direct - the marking is done by the verb, or by syntactical features, such as word order. The most common secondary alignment in these languages is nominative-accusative by far, then very marginally ergative.

There are a few rare languages in the world that are truly direct-marking. A good example is Dakota, with extensive documentation on it. In Dakota, which doesn't have fixed word order, verbs take up most of the marking. Due to its, in essence, nonconfigurationality, Dakota's syntax permits various word order permutations, leading to ambiguous situations where there is no marking, neither on the verb nor nouns, to show actual relations. Lakota, its close relative, also has such an MSA.

The direct morphosyntactical alignment behaves as such:

I am not aware of any valency-decreasing voices that occur in direct-aligned languages.

Examples of a pure and impure direct language are Lakota and English, respectively.


 * Lakota: Wičhaša kiŋ wiŋyaŋ kiŋ waŋyaŋke (the man the woman see)
 * English: The man sees the woman / The woman sees the man

Nominative-Accusative
The nominative-accusative morphosyntactic alignment is the second most common MSA, after direct. Queerly, its speakers cound for a disproprtionate amount of the world's populace. In essence, the nominative-accusative alignment distinguishes between the Agent and Subject on one side, and the Patient on the other.

Nominative-accusative languages are very well known and well-studied. They are amongst the "most purely aligned" languages, so to speak, but are nonetheless oft corrupted by other alignments syntactically. A good example is English, with ergative verbs sprinkled around. These verbs cannot be traditionally passivised. For example:
 * I broke the window.
 * *The window broke by me.

No matter this exception, English is overwhelmingly nominative over ergative, in word order and pronominal marking. While Enlgish is moving towards a direct alignment in quite a haste, there are some languages that, in addition to distinguishing the nominative and accusative, also make distinctions between plenty other cases. Such an example is Modern Sanskrit, the most complex Indo-European language still spoken (but not the most complex attested, which is Vedic Sanskrit), having eight cases, three numbers and as many genders.

Continental nominative-accusative Indo-European languages appear to be losing their nominativity in modern times: west of German, the languages are becoming direct-aligning, as well as northwards. German is dialectically split between the northern, less marking languages, and southern, more marking. The Baltic, Slavic and Balkan languages are in between the two extremes, preserving nominativity, while as one goes more and more south-east, more alignments pop up, primarily tripartite, but even an occasional transitive.

The nominative-accusative alignment behaves as such:

The Subject and Agent are marked in the nominative, and the Patient is marked in the accusative.

A very common feature of nominative languages is the passive voice. The passive voice is a special valency-adjusting voice, demoting the verb from transitive to intransitive, and promoting the patient to a subject. The former agent may thus be added as an indirect argument of the verb:


 * John kills the bear > The bear is killed (by John)

Not all nominative languages have the passive - the Slavic languages have in its place a mediopassive voice, and the passive usually requires a complex and queer-sounding construction to work.

Marked Nominative
An unusual subset of the nominative-accusative languages are the nominative-absolutive languages, or, as more commonly called, marked-nominative languages.

They are primarily found in Africa, in some Berber dialects and in Nilo-Saharan languages of Sudan. An example from Middle Atlas Berber:


 * Ičča uryaz aksum
 * The man has eaten the meat

In the example sentence, "uryaz" is recognised as the subject, and "aksum" the object. The word "uryaz" is actually inflected by the prefix "u-", to mark it for the nominative.

There are various explanations as to why this marking has occured, but the one with more credibility than plenty of the rest is that it is an areal feature, an influence of a language that was previously ergative-absolutive.

Ergative-Absolutive
The ergative-absolutive morphosyntactic alignment is the second most common two-case alignment in the world. The distribution of ergative-absolutive MSA is pretty regional (although lone examples can easily be found), and the highest concentration of ergative-absolutive aligning languges is in the Caucasus (where the members of the three Caucasian families all have a very high tendency to be ergative) and Tibet. They are, of course, found in other places, such as, for example, on the western border of Spain and France (Basque).

Although all languages counted as ergative-absolutive have an ergative morphology, many have a nominative-accusative syntax; there are no documented or attested languages in our history to have had ergative syntax but a non-ergative morphology.

Good examples of very pure ergative languages are Basque and Lezgian. Example of Basque's ergativity:
 * Martinek egunkariak erosten dizkit
 * Martin buys the newspapers for me

Ergative-absolutive alignment in essence distinguishes between the Agent on one side, and the Subject and Patient on the other. As shown in the example sentence, the ergative agent, here Martin, is marked. So far, no absolutive-marking languages have yet been found.

The ergative-absolutive alignment behaves as such:

A very common feature of ergative-absolutive aligning language is the antipassive voice which works by deleting the patient and promoting the ergative agent to an absolutive subject. Basque has a queer-working antipassive in that it promotes the agent but doesn't delete the patient, leading to a situation where both arguments are marked with the absolutive. An example of this antipassive variation:


 * Gauza miragarriak ikusi ditut nik.
 * Gauza miragarriak ikusia naiz.

The first sentence means "I have seen beautiful things", while the other would have to be translated into "I am seen beautiful things".

Split Ergativity
A strange phenomenon in ergative-absolutive languages that happens in certain languages, dividing the alignment according to person, is called split-ergativity. A good example of this subtype is Sumerian. Sumerian behaves as a nominative–accusative aligning language in the 1st and 2nd person of present-future tense and incompletive aspect, but as an ergative-absolutive aligning language in other forms of the indicative mood. Due to severe influence from Akkadian, Sumerian had aquired an almost purely nominative syntax by the late 3rd millenium BC, leaning to a topic-prominent language.

A good example of Sumerian split ergativity:


 * Lugal-e e2 mu-un-du3
 * E2 ib2-du3-un

The first sentence means "The king built the house", and its alignment is ergative, while the other means "I built the house", aligned nominatively.