Morphosyntactic Alignment - Ergative Vs. Accusative

Ergative Vs. Accusative

Ergative languages contrast with nominative–accusative languages (such as English), which treat the objects of transitive verbs distinctly from other core arguments.

These different arguments can be symbolized as follows:

• O = most patient-like argument of a transitive clause (also symbolized as P)
• S = sole argument of an intransitive clause
• A = most agent-like argument of a transitive clause

The S/A/O terminology avoids the use of terms like "subject" and "object", which are not stable concepts from language to language. Moreover, it avoids the terms "agent" and "patient", which are semantic roles that do not correspond consistently to particular arguments. For instance, the A might be an experiencer or a source, semantically, not just an agent.

The relationship between ergative and accusative systems can be schematically represented as the following:

The following Basque examples demonstrate ergative–absolutive case marking system:

Ergative Language

Sentence:	Gizona etorri da.			Gizonak mutila ikusi du.
Words:	gizona-∅	etorri da		gizona-k	mutila-∅	ikusi du
Gloss:	the.man-	has arrived		the.man-	boy-	saw
Function:	S	VERBintrans		A	O	VERBtrans
Translation:	'The man has arrived.'			'The man saw the boy.'

In Basque, gizona is "the man" and mutila is "the boy". In a sentence like mutila gizonak ikusi du, you know who's seeing whom because -k is always added to the one doing the seeing. So this means 'the man saw the boy'. To say 'the boy saw the man', just add the "-k" to the boy: mutilak gizona ikusi du.

With a verb like etorri "come" there's no need to tell "who's coming whom", so no -k is ever added. "The boy came" is 'mutila etorri da'.

To contrast with a nominative–accusative language, Japanese marks nouns with a different case marking:

Accusative Language

Sentence:	Kodomo ga tsuita.			Otoko ga kodomo o mita.
Words:	kodomo ga	tsuita		otoko ga	kodomo o	mita
Gloss:	child	arrived		man	child	saw
Function:	S	VERBintrans		A	O	VERBtrans
Translation:	'The child arrived.'			'The man saw the child.'

In this language, in the sentence "man saw child", the one doing the seeing (man) may be marked with ga, which works like Basque "-k" (and the one who is seen may be marked with o). However, in the sentences like the child arrived, where there's no need of telling "who arrived whom", there may be a ga. This is unlike Basque, where "-k" is completely forbidden in such sentences.