Alignment (morphosyntactic)

Translations

Allineamento | structure d’actance | morphosyntaktische Ausrichtung

Article

Morphosyntactic alignment, or simply alignment, is a morphosyntactic structural feature governing the codification of core semantic roles into grammatical relationships (Dixon 1994). It is typologically distributed and is scalar rather than polarized. Two polar configurations are:

1. the ergative-absolutive system, involving the presence of a single codification for the PATIENT and (inaccusative intranstive) SUBJECT opposed to a different codification for the AGENT. In a formula, it can be expressed as S = O ≠ A (where S indicates the subject case, O the patient case, A the agent case. The AGENT case is called ergative, and it is typically marked. The PATIENT/SUBJECT case is called absolutive, and it is often unmarked (it is not unusual for it to be encoded by a 0-morpheme in inflected and agglutinative languages).
2. the nominative-accusative system, involving the presence of a single codification for the SUBJECT and AGENT roles, and a different one for the PATIENT. In this case, the AGENT/SUBJECT case is called nominative, while the PATIENT role is called accusative. The pattern is: S = A ≠ O.
   

However, as the opposition is all but polarized, and many languages present a mix of ergative-absolutive and nominative-accusative behaviors, producing a range of phenomena that are referred to as “split-ergative” patterns. In systems that base on the A,S,O coordinates, semantically inergative predicates may pattern with either transitive or inaccusative predicates, often in a hardly predictable fashion, which contributes to the complexity of the possible outcomes.

Other models of alignment also exist, including the active-stative alignment, in which the semantic core opposition is based on the semantics features of the predication, and a few minor systems that are represented in a very modest amount of observed languages. The active-stative alignment has received a fair amount of attention in historical grammar, because some scholars propose that Indo-European patterned with it (Bauer 2000, recently discussed by Viti 2014).
In contact scenarios, alignment systems are relevant because it may trigger and/or be affected by grammatical interference.

References

Bauer, B. 2000. Archaic syntax in Indo-European: the spread of transitivity in Latin and French, Berlin. Dixon, R. 1994. Ergativity. Cambridge. Viti, C. 2014. Reconstructing Syntactic Variation in Proto-Indo-European, in Indo-European Linguistics 2, 73-111.