Active-stative alignment

Translations

allineamento attivo-stativo | Aktivsprache | langue active

Article

The active-stative alignment is a super-type of alignment that includes several subtypes, which all have in common the existence of a criterion for morphologically marking the core cases of the predication depending on their semantic role. In general, while an opposition exists between agent morpheme (A) used for transitive grammatical subjects and patient morpheme (O) used for transitive objects, intransitive verbs can take either an agent-oriented (S_A) or a patient-oriented (S_O) subject depending on the semantic properties of the actants.

While this alignment is common, in its different realizations, in several languages of Asia and Meso- and Southamerica, its relevance for ancient languages has been debated. Notably, it has been hypothesized that Proto-Indoeuropean, or an ancestor of if, at some stage featured some active-stative traits (cf. e.g. Gamrkrelidze 1994). Historical Indo-European languages may exhibits some features that are related to an active-stative pattern, such as split-intransitivity in Ancient Anatolian (see below).

Example

Garrett's law for Hittite intransitives (Garrett 1990), which also holds for Luwic and, arguably, for all languages of Ancient Anatolia, states that clitic subject pronouns occur obligatorily to mark the S_O of unaccusative intransitive verbs, and may not occur to mark the S_A of unergative intransitive verbs.

n=aš aki
conn=he die.prs3sg
he dies

but:

natta=ma=wa išparizzi
not=but=quot kick.prs3sg
(it) does not kick

References

Gamkrelidze, Th. V. (1994). Proto-Indo-European as a Language of Stative-Active Typology. In: Indogermanica et Caucasica, pp. 25-35. Garrett, A. (1990). ‘Hittite Enclitic Subjects and Transitive Verbs’. Journal of Cuneiform Studies 42, pp. 227-42.