Morphosyntactic alignment

Morphological alignment: Neutral (without explicit morphological case) [51.6%], Nominative-accusative [ S/A, P] (standard: accusatory or nominative marked [24.2%], marked: only nominative explicitly marked [3.2%], Ergativo-Absolutivo [S/P, A] [16.8%] Active-inactive [Sighs]_P/P, S_A[2.1%] and Tripartite [S, A, P](three different brands for S, A, P) [2.1%].

morphosyntactic alignment is a term used to describe the way in which the arguments of transitive and intransitive verbs are marked in sentences in some languages. From this view, most languages can be classified as either nominative-accusative or ergative-absolutive (a third type is active-inactive alignment and mixed alignments). of the above types).

An example of a nominative-accusative language is French, while Basque is an ergative-absolutive language. The following two sentences illustrate the alignment of both (see example image):

(French)

(1a) il It's up. = '(he) has arrived'

(2a) il him Voit = '(he) sees it.'

(euskera)

(1b) gizona etorri da = 'man has come'

(2b) gizonak mutilation ikusi = 'Man has seen the boy'

Basic Alignments

Morphosyntactic alignment is one of the most important typological parameters of a language, since almost all other areas of grammar are affected by the alignment type. The alignment serves to interpret the thematic role of each one of the participants in a verbal action (agent, patient, subject, experimenter, etc.).

It is generally accepted that there are three types of basic alignments in the world's languages. To explain the three basic alignments it is common to introduce the following types of participants:

• Active intransitive subject (Sa) or only participant of an interpretable preaching as an agent.
• Inactive intransitive subject (So) or only participant of an interpretable preaching as an experienced, experienced or subject.
• Active transitional subject (A), in a transitional sentence, which is interpretable as an agent.
• Direct inactive object (O), in a transitional sentence, which is interpretable as a subject or patient.

According to this classification of the participants, the following alignments are frequent:

• Nominative-accusative, is the type of alignment in which Sa, So and A are treated in the same way (name) and O is treated differently (accusive). Of the languages with an explicit morphological case, about 55% of the languages have this type of alignment.
• Ergative-absolutive, is the type of alignment where Sa, So and O are treated in the same way (absolutive) and A is treated differently (ergative). Of the languages with an explicit morphological case, 35% have this type of alignment.
• Active-inactive, is the type of alignment where Sa and A have the same type of treatment (active) and So and O have inactive treatment. This type of alignment appears around 5% of the languages with explicit case.
• Tripartite, in which S, A and O receive a different brand each of them, so there are three brands instead of two as in the previous three systems. This type of alignment appears around 5% of the languages with explicit case.

This alignment can be expressed through various procedures, such as adpositions or particles, verbal affixes, order of constituents, intonation or a combination of these procedures.

Examples

Nominative-accusative languages

Nahuatl is an example of a nominative-accusative language that has the possibility of marking both the verb and the agent and the patient of an action, when two participants appear. The intransitive forms of the verb itta 'see' are:

The nominative-accusative alignment of the languages can be appreciated when comparing the previous forms with the transitive forms with two participants: agent (blue) and patient or subject (red):

The morphemes in green indicate that it is a reflexive form.

Ergative-absolutive languages

Basque is a consistently ergative language that marks patient and agent in the conjugated verb form (usually the auxiliary *ukan 'haber' or izan 'to be'). The following table shows the present conjugation of the verb ikusi through the auxiliary verb; all forms have the form:

ikusten + AUXILIAR

The following table includes both the formal or respect forms in the second person (fr.) and the informal masculine (m. inf.) and feminine (f. in.) forms.

The ergative character of the language appears clear when the above is compared with the intransitive forms with only one participant (in this case the auxiliary will be izan):

Mixed languages

Another group of languages are not consistently ergative or consistently accusative, but, depending on certain factors (usually a hierarchy of animacy), use nominative-accusative marking in some cases and ergative-absolutive marking in others. That phenomenon is known as split ergativity. The central Mapuche is an example of that kind of behavior^{[citation required]}. The intransitive forms of the verb 'mirar' are:

The mixed alignment of the languages can be seen in one of the transitive forms with two participants: agent (blue) and patient or subject (red):

The morphemes in green indicate that it is a reflexive form.

Active-inactive languages

This type of alignment is very frequent, for example, among the Arawak languages. For example, it has been very well studied in Lokono and closely related languages, such as Guajiro. Some Otomanguean languages, such as the Amuzgo language and Chocho, also present this type of alignment.

Some authors, such as Dixon, have proposed that active-inactive languages can be interpreted as languages with split ergativity controlled by the meaning of the intransitive verb, which is formally correct but perhaps misleading to consider these languages a particular case of ergative tongue.