Morphosyntactic alignment

The two major systems of morphosyntactic alignment found in languages throughout the world are the nominative-accusative and the ergative-absolutive. In order to explain what this means we must consider the following:

There are three syntactic roles, that we may call S, A and P:

S is the single argument of an intransitive verb;
A and P are the two core arguments of a transitive verb (A = agent/subject, P = patient/object).

Accusative and ergative languages differ as to how they mark those syntactic arguments.

Nominative-accusative languages group S and A, and leave P aside. If there exists morphological case marking, then S and A are both marked with a case conventionally known as "nominative", while P is marked with a case called "accusative". If there's no case marking, the language can resort to word order (for example, S and A come before the verb, while P comes after it).

Ergative-absolutive languages group S and P, and leave A aside. Either they resort to word order (as above), or they mark A with the ergative case, while S and P are marked with the absolutive case.

Table of contents

1 Examples

1.1 Nominative-accusative languages
1.2 Ergative-absolutive languages

2 Split ergativity
3 Traces of ergativity in English
4 See also

Examples

Nominative-accusative languages

Germanic and Romance languages, as well as the majority of other languages in the world, are nominative-accusative. English has no morphological case distinction between nominative and accusative, except for the pronouns, and it relies solely on word order to differentiate S/A and P. The same applies to the Romance languages. German retains case marking, most notably applied to articles.

Consider German:

Der Mann kam. "The man arrived."

Der Mann sah den Knaben. "The man saw the boy."

Der and den both mean "the". The form of the definite article changes according to both the grammatical gender and quantity of the noun it applies to, and also according to the case (accusative or dative) prescribed by a transitive verb for its objects.

The subject of the sentence, Mann, is placed in the nominative case. Der is the nominative singular masculine article.

In the second example sentence, the verb sah (like the majority of German transitive verbs) prescribes the accusative case for its object. Thus, the definite article is changed to den, for a masculine singular word (Knaben) in the accusative case.

Old English had a similar system to German, which gradually disappeared from use. (See Declension in English.)

Ergative-absolutive languages

The only ergative-absolutive European language is Basque. Note the following examples:

Gizona etorri da. "The man has arrived."

Gizonak mutila ikusi du. "The man saw the boy."

In Basque, gizon is "man", mutil is "boy", and a suffixed -a shows the definite form ("the"). You will notice that gizon is different depending on whether it is the subject of a transitive or intransitive verb. The first form is in the absolutive case (marked by a null morpheme) and the second form is in the ergative case (marked by a suffixed -k).

Other languages that employ an ergative-absolutive system are:

Sāmoan and many other Oceanic languages
Virtually all Caucasian languages (Abkhaz, Chechen, etc.)
The various Inuit dialects (Inuktitut, Inupik, Yupik)

Split ergativity

Many languages classified as ergative in fact show split ergativity, whereby syntactic and/or morphological ergative pattern are conditioned by some part of the grammatical context (typically the persons of the verb arguments, or the tense/aspect of the verb). Georgian verbs are ergative in the aorist but nominative in the present. Dyirbal verbs are nominative when the subject is first or second person, but ergative when the subject is third person.

Traces of ergativity in English

English does show a trace of something that could be regarded as ergativity. With an intransitive verb, adding the suffix -ee to the verb produces a label for the person performing the action:

"John has retired." → "John is a retiree."

"John has escaped." → "John is an escapee."

"John is standing." → "John is a standee."

However, with a transitive verb, adding -ee does not produce a label for the person doing the action. Instead, it gives us a label for the person to whom the action is done:

"Mike employs Susie." → "Susie is an employee."

"Mike has inducted Susie." → "Susie is an inductee."

"Mike has appointed Susie" → "Susie is an appointee."

The differing effect of the -ee suffix, depending on the transitivity of the verb, can be considered ergativity.