Questions tagged [morphosyntactic-alignment]
The morphosyntactic-alignment tag has no usage guidance.
9 questions
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Are all alignments of A, P, Sa and Sp attested?
I put together this graphic to visualize what I think are all possible alignments of A, P, Sa and Sp:
(Sorry the text is so small; I had to downsize the image so the height wouldn't take up the full ...
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How does a language end up with ergative-absolutive alignment on nouns, but nominative-accusative in verb concord?
In Two Types of Ergative Agreement: Implications for Case (Coon, 2015), the author explains that there are broadly two different ways a language can be "ergative". One is that it can be ...
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Does Subject vs Object matter in languages with ergative absolutive marking
If a language has an ergative absolutive alignment in which subjects and objects of clauses are marked for absolutive marking does the distinction between subject and object ever get difficult to ...
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What is the nominal attribute in Milewski's typology?
The wikipedia page on Milewski Typology gives 6 divisions:
Milewski proposed a division of languages into 6 groups, based upon
consideration of 4 main syntactic relationships; these were:
the ...
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Are all "Ergative Languages" split-ergative?
I've noticed that in a lot of examples of "ergative languages," there is some piece of the language that does not fit the pattern we call "ergativity." For example, Basque does not mark ergative case ...
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Languages with direct-inverse verbal inflection or hierarchical alignment but no verbal inflection for person
Some languages have direct-inverse marking on verbs or hierarchical alignment.
I'm wondering whether there are any attested examples of minimal direct-inverse systems where the verb is obligatorily ...
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Direct–inverse marking on the noun, or the possiblity of inverse alignment
A direct-inverse language, Wikipedia claims, is one which
involve[s] different grammar for transitive predications according to the relative positions of their "subject" and their "object" on a ...
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Configurational assignment of accusative case?
I'm an undergraduate linguistics student, and I'm currently reading this chapter by Coon & Preminger (2015) (http://ling.umd.edu/assets/publications/Coon-Preminger-17-SplitErgativity.pdf), which ...
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Do different alignments restrict what kind of word order a language can have?
I've read somewhere that all known ergative languages are either verb-initial, or verb-final. I find this surprising, but I don't know of any counter-examples.
I've seen plenty of nominative ...
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