Morphosyntactic alignment

In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between arguments—specifically, between the two arguments (in English, subject and object) of transitive verbs like the dog chased the cat, and the single argument of intransitive verbs like the cat ran away. English has a subject, which merges the more active argument of transitive verbs with the argument of intransitive verbs, leaving the object in transitive verbs distinct; other languages may have different strategies, or, rarely, make no distinction at all. Distinctions may be made morphologically (through case and agreement), syntactically (through word order), or both.

Terminology

Dixon (1994)

The following notations will be used to discuss the various types of alignment:

S (from sole), the subject of an intransitive verb;

A (from agent), the subject of a transitive verb;

O (from object), the object of a transitive verb. Some authors use the label P (from patient) for O.

Note that while the labels S, A, O/P originally stood for subject, agent, object, and patient, respectively, the concepts of S, A, and O/P are distinct both from the grammatical relations and thematic relations. In other words, an A or S need not be an agent or subject, and an O need not be a patient.

Note, however, that these semantic macro-roles in Dixon's model differ from those in Klimov's model (1983), which uses five macro-roles (with both S and O divided into two categories).

In a nominative–accusative system, S and A are grouped together, contrasting O. In an ergative–absolutive system, S and O are one group and contrast with A. The English language represents a typical nominative–accusative system (accusative for short). The name derived from the nominative and accusative cases. Basque is an ergative–absolutive system (or simply ergative).