Adyghe grammar
grammar of the Adyghe language
Adyghe is a polysynthetic language with an ergative verb-final clause structure and rich verb morphology.
Ergative–absolutive
Unlike the majority of languages in the world which follow Nominative–accusative alignment, Adyghe follows Ergative–absolutive alignment.
The distinction between syntactic cases is crucial for understanding who is doing the action and to whom. Nouns in Adyghe take the following case roles in a sentence depending on the verb's transitivity:
Absolutive case: Marked with the suffix -р /-r/. It indicates the subject of an intransitive verb or the direct object of a transitive verb.
Ergative case: Marked with the suffix -м /-m/. It indicates the subject (agent) of a transitive verb.
Oblique case: Also marked with the suffix -м /-m/. It marks the target of the action in bivalent intransitive verbs, functions as the indirect object (dative) in ditransitive verbs, and acts as a locative argument in transitive verbs with prepositional prefixes.
The following basic example demonstrates this ergative–absolutive case marking system:
Here, "table" has the absolutive case mark -р /-r/ while "man" has the ergative case mark -м /-m/.
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