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 distinct; other languages may have different strategies, or, rarely, make no distinction at all. Distinctions may be made morphologically (through grammatical case or verbal agreement), syntactically (through word order), or both.

For example, in English, in the dog chased the cat (transitive verb, two arguments), and in the bird flew (intransitive verb, one argument), 'dog' and 'bird' are both subjects, which is shown by their appearance before the verb, while 'cat' is different, an object, coming after the verb. Not all languages treat 'dog' and 'bird' as equivalent the way English does: in some 'cat' and 'bird' will be equivalent, while 'dog' is different, and there are yet other systems.