Topic summary
Ergative–absolutive
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Ergative–absolutive alignment.
In linguistic typology, ergative–absolutive alignment is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the subject of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the agent of a transitive verb. In ergative–absolutive languages with grammatical case, the ergative case refers to the marking of agents of transitive verbs, distinguishing it from the concept of a "subject" of a transitive or intransitive verb in English. The case for the single argument of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb is called the absolutive.