User:Elector Dark/Morphosyntactic Alignment

In linguistics, the general meaning of morphosyntactical 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.

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 has a very lax normal word order of SOV, 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:

{|class="wikitable" style="text-align:center" !colspan=2|Direct MSA
 * bgcolor="#eeeeee" valign="mid" colspan=2| S ubject
 * bgcolor="#eeeeee" valign="mid" | A gent
 * bgcolor="#eeeeee" valign="mid" | P atient
 * bgcolor="#eeeeee" valign="mid" | A gent
 * bgcolor="#eeeeee" valign="mid" | P atient