![Accusative alignment](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Accusative_alignment.svg)
In
linguistic typology
Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the co ...
, nominative–accusative alignment is a type of
morphosyntactic alignment
In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between Argument (linguistics), arguments—specifically, between the two arguments (in English, subject and object) of transitive verbs like ''the dog chased the cat'', an ...
in which subjects of
intransitive verb
In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb whose context does not entail a direct object. That lack of transitivity distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Additionally, intransitive verbs are ...
s are treated like subjects of
transitive verb
A transitive verb is a verb that accepts one or more objects, for example, 'cleaned' in ''Donald cleaned the window''. This contrasts with intransitive verbs, which do not have objects, for example, 'panicked' in ''Donald panicked''.
Transitiv ...
s, and are distinguished from objects of transitive verbs in basic clause constructions. Nominative–accusative alignment can be coded by
case-marking, verb
agreement Agreement may refer to:
Agreements between people and organizations
* Gentlemen's agreement, not enforceable by law
* Trade agreement, between countries
* Consensus, a decision-making process
* Contract, enforceable in a court of law
** Meeting o ...
and/or
word order
In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...
. It has a wide global distribution and is the most common alignment system among the world's languages (including English). Languages with nominative–accusative alignment are commonly called ''nominative–accusative languages''.
Comparison with other alignment types
A transitive verb is associated with two noun phrases (or
arguments
An argument is a statement or group of statements called premises intended to determine the degree of truth or acceptability of another statement called conclusion. Arguments can be studied from three main perspectives: the logical, the dialectic ...
): a
subject and a
direct object
In linguistics, an object is any of several types of arguments. In subject-prominent, nominative-accusative languages such as English, a transitive verb typically distinguishes between its subject and any of its objects, which can include but ...
. An intransitive verb is associated with only one argument, a subject. The different kinds of arguments are usually represented as S, A, and O. S is the sole argument of an intransitive verb, A is the subject (or most
agent-like) argument of a transitive verb, and O is the direct object (or most
patient-like) argument of a transitive verb. English has nominative–accusative alignment in its case marking of personal pronouns:
the single argument (S) of an intransitive verb ("I" in the sentence "I walked.") behaves grammatically like the agent (A) of a transitive verb ("I" in the sentence "I saw them.") but differently from the object (O) of a transitive verb ("me" in the sentence “they saw me.").
This is in contrast with
ergative–absolutive alignment
In linguistic typology, ergative–absolutive alignment is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the single argument (" subject") of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the agent of a tra ...
, where S is coded in the same way as O, while A receives distinct marking, or
tripartite alignment, where A, S and O all are coded in a different manner.
Split ergativity
It is common for languages (such as
Georgian
Georgian may refer to:
Common meanings
* Anything related to, or originating from Georgia (country)
** Georgians, an indigenous Caucasian ethnic group
** Georgian language, a Kartvelian language spoken by Georgians
**Georgian scripts, three scrip ...
and
Hindustani) to have overlapping alignment systems, which exhibit both nominative–accusative and ergative–absolutive coding, a phenomenon called
split ergativity
In linguistic typology, split ergativity is a feature of certain languages where some constructions use ergative syntax and morphology, but other constructions show another pattern, usually nominative–accusative. The conditions in which ergati ...
. In fact, there are relatively few languages that exhibit only ergative–absolutive alignment (called pure ergativity) and tend to be isolated in certain regions of the world, such as the
Caucasus
The Caucasus () or Caucasia (), is a region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, mainly comprising Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and parts of Southern Russia. The Caucasus Mountains, including the Greater Caucasus range, have historically ...
, parts of
North America
North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Car ...
and
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area in southern North America and most of Central America. It extends from approximately central Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica. W ...
, the
Tibetan Plateau
The Tibetan Plateau (, also known as the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau or the Qing–Zang Plateau () or as the Himalayan Plateau in India, is a vast elevated plateau located at the intersection of Central, South and East Asia covering most of the Ti ...
, and
Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...
. Such languages include
Sumerian,
Standard Tibetan
Lhasa Tibetan (), or Standard Tibetan, is the Tibetan dialect spoken by educated people of Lhasa, the capital of the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China. It is an official language of the Tibet Autonomous Region.
In the traditional "three-branch ...
, and
Mayan
Mayan most commonly refers to:
* Maya peoples, various indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and northern Central America
* Maya civilization, pre-Columbian culture of Mesoamerica and northern Central America
* Mayan languages, language family spoken ...
.
Coding properties of nominative–accusative alignment
Nominative–accusative alignment can manifest itself in visible ways, called coding properties. Often, these visible properties are morphological and the distinction will appear as a difference in the actual morphological form and spelling of the word, or as case particles (pieces of morphology) which will appear before or after the word.
Case marking
If a language exhibits morphological case marking, arguments S and A will appear in the
nominative case
In grammar, the nominative case (abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or (in Latin and formal variants of Engl ...
and argument O will appear in the
accusative case
The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb.
In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘the ...
, or in a similar case such as the
oblique
Oblique may refer to:
* an alternative name for the character usually called a slash (punctuation) ( / )
* Oblique angle, in geometry
*Oblique triangle, in geometry
*Oblique lattice, in geometry
* Oblique leaf base, a characteristic shape of the b ...
. There may be more than one case fulfilling the accusative role; for instance,
Finnish
Finnish may refer to:
* Something or someone from, or related to Finland
* Culture of Finland
* Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland
* Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people
* Finnish cuisine
See also ...
marks objects with the
partitive In linguistics, the partitive is a word, phrase, or case that indicates partialness. Nominal partitives are syntactic constructions, such as "some of the children", and may be classified semantically as either set partitives or entity partitives ba ...
or the
accusative
The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb.
In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘the ...
to contrast
telicity
In linguistics, telicity (; ) is the property of a verb or verb phrase that presents an action or event as having a specific endpoint. A verb or verb phrase with this property is said to be ''telic''; if the situation it describes is ''not'' hea ...
. It is highly common for only accusative arguments to exhibit overt case marking while nominative arguments exhibit null (or absent) case markings. In Modern English, case marking is only found with first and (non-neuter) third person pronouns, which have distinct subject and object forms.
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
Differential object marking (DOM)
Not all arguments are equally likely to exhibit overt case marking. In languages with nominative–accusative alignment, it is common to divide direct objects into two classes (with respect to overt case marking), a phenomenon called ‘differential object marking’ by Bossong (1985).
Word order
Some languages code very little through morphology and are more dependent on syntax to encode meaning and grammatical relationships. If a language relies less on overt case marking, alignment may be coded through word order, as in this example from
Indonesian
Indonesian is anything of, from, or related to Indonesia, an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. It may refer to:
* Indonesians, citizens of Indonesia
** Native Indonesians, diverse groups of local inhabitants of the archipelago
** Indonesian ...
.
Indonesian
In the following example from French, all subjects, both S and A, appear before the verb while O appears after the verb. Arguments occurring before the verb are coded as nominative, while arguments occurring directly after the verb are coded as accusative.
French
Verb agreement
Alternatively, alignment can also manifest visibly through agreement on the verb. In the following example from
Amharic
Amharic ( or ; (Amharic: ), ', ) is an Ethiopian Semitic language, which is a subgrouping within the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages. It is spoken as a first language by the Amharas, and also serves as a lingua franca for all oth ...
, the verb can be
head-marked for S, A, and O. Both S in the intransitive clause and A in the transitive clause are marked by the same affix (''-ə'' ‘3SG.M’), while O in the transitive clause is marked by a different affix (''-w'' ‘3SG.M.O’).
[
;Amharic
:intransitive
:transitive
English has residual verb agreement with nominative–accusative alignment, which is only manifest with third person singular S and A in present tense.][Bickel, Balthasar; Iemmolo, Giorgio; Zakharko, Taras; Witzlack-Makarevich, Alena (2013)]
"Patterns of alignment in verb agreement"
In: Bakker, Dik; Haspelmath, Martin. ''Languages across boundaries: Studies in memory of Anna Siewierska.'' Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 15-36.
Behavioral properties of accusativity
Nominative–accusative alignment can also be distinguished through behavioral properties, in the way a nominative or accusative argument will behave when placed in particular syntactic constructions. This has to do with the impact of alignment on the level of the whole sentence rather than the individual word. Morphosyntactic alignment determines which arguments can be omitted in a coordinate structure during the process of conjunction reduction (deleting arguments from the ends of joined clauses). In nominative–accusative, only arguments S and A can be omitted and not argument O.
English
:a. Sue-NOMi saw Judy-ACCj , and shei/j ran.
:b. Suei saw Judyj and ___i/*j ran.
:c. Suei saw Judyj, and shei/j was frightened.
:d. Suei saw Judyj and ___i/*j was frightened.
The omitted subject argument of the embedded clause must correspond to the subject (nominative) of the matrix-clause. If it corresponds to the object (accusative), the sentence is ungrammatical.
If English were an ergative–absolutive language, one would expect to see:
:b’. Suei saw Judyj, and ___*i/j ran.
:c’. Suei saw Judyj, and ___*i/j was frightened.
Here the omitted argument of the embedded clause corresponds to the direct object (absolutive) of the matrix-clause. If it corresponds to the subject (ergative), the sentence is ungrammatical.
The alignment system also impacts the triggering and realization of other such syntactic processes as raising
Raising may refer to:
*Raising (linguistics), a syntactic construction
*Raising (phonetics), a sound change
*Raising (metalworking), a metalworking technique
*Barn raising, a community event to erect the wooden framework for a building
*Fundraising ...
constructions, subject-controlled subject deletion and object-controlled subject deletion.
Distribution
Languages exhibiting accusative alignment are the most widespread of all of the alignment types. These languages can be found on every continent, in comparison to languages with ergative alignment that are restricted to certain areas of the world, namely the Caucasus, parts of North American and Mesoamerica, the Tibetan plateau, and Australia. The map shows the distribution of languages with the various alignment types, and the following list gives a short sampling of accusative languages and their distribution across the globe:[Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). (2011) "The World Atlas of Language Structures Online". Munich: Max Planck Digital Library. Available online a]
WALS
/ref>
Relevant theory
Optimality theory
One of the ways in which the production of a nominative–accusative case marking system can be explained is from an Optimality Theoretic perspective. Case marking is said to fulfill two functions, or constraints: an identifying function and a distinguishing function.[de Hoop, Helen and Malchukov, Andrej L. (2008) "Case-marking strategies". ''Linguistic Inquiry''.] The identifying function is exemplified when case morphology encodes (identifies) specific semantic
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...
, thematic, or pragmatic
Pragmatism is a philosophical movement.
Pragmatism or pragmatic may also refer to:
*Pragmaticism, Charles Sanders Peirce's post-1905 branch of philosophy
*Pragmatics, a subfield of linguistics and semiotics
*''Pragmatics'', an academic journal in ...
properties or information about the nominal argument. Accusative case in the position of the direct object, for example, can be a strong identifier of patienthood. The distinguishing function is used to distinguish between the core arguments, the subject and the object, of a transitive clause. Helen de Hoop
Helen de Hoop (born 1964) is a Dutch linguist and Professor of Theoretical Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen. She is known for her works on the relationship between the form and interpretation of language.
Education and career
de Hoop ...
and Andrej Malchukov explain the motivation and need for the distinguishing function in "Case marking strategies":
It is rare for case to serve only the distinguishing function, which overlaps greatly with the ‘identify’ function. Other ways of disambiguating the arguments of a transitive predicate (subject agreement, word order restriction, context, intonation, etc.) may explain this cross-linguistic observation. De Hoop and Malchukov argue that case systems that are completely based on the identification function must be richer in case morphology compared to languages based mainly on the distinguishing function.
Functional pressure
One theory that has been posited to account for the occurrence of accusative systems is that of functional pressure. When applied to languages, this theory operates around the various needs and pressures on a speech community. It has been suggested that languages have evolved to suit the needs of their users.These communities will develop some functional system to meet the needs that they have. So, it has been proposed that the accusative system arose from a functional pressure to avoid ambiguity and make communication a simpler process.[Bates, E., & MacWhinney, B. (1982) ''Functionalist approaches to grammar''. In E.Wanner, & L. Gleitman (Ed.), ''Language acquisition: The state of the art''. New York:
Cambridge University Press.][Fedzechkina, Maryia & Jaeger, T. Florian & Newport, Elissa L. (2011) "Functional Biases in Language Learning: Evidence from Word Order and Case-Marking Interaction". ''Cognitive Science''.]
It is useful for languages to have a means of distinguishing between subjects and objects, and between arguments A, S, and O. This is helpful so that sentences like "Tom hit Fred" cannot be interpreted as "Fred hit Tom." Tripartite
Tripartite means composed of or split into three parts, or refers to three parties. Specifically, it may also refer to any of the following:
* 3 (number)
* Tripartite language
* Tripartite motto
* Tripartite System in British education
* Triparti ...
alignment systems accomplish this differentiation by coding S, A and O all differently. However, this is not structurally economical, and tripartite systems are comparatively rare, but to have all arguments marked the same makes the arguments too ambiguous. Alongside the principle of distinguishability seems to operate a principle of economy. It is more efficient to have as few cases as possible without compromising intelligibility. In this way the dual pressures of efficiency and economy have produced a system which patterns two kinds of arguments together a third separately. Both accusative and ergative systems use this kind of grouping to make meaning clearer.
See also
* Accusative case
The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb.
In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘the ...
* Case (grammar)
A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals), which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nominal ...
* Ergative–absolutive language
* Morphosyntactic alignment
In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between Argument (linguistics), arguments—specifically, between the two arguments (in English, subject and object) of transitive verbs like ''the dog chased the cat'', an ...
* Nominative case
In grammar, the nominative case (abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or (in Latin and formal variants of Engl ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nominative-accusative language
Syntax
Linguistic typology