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 ...

, transitive alignment is a type of

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 ...

used in a small number of languages in which a single

grammatical case A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and Numeral (linguistics), numerals) that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a Nominal group (functional grammar), n ...

is used to mark both

arguments An argument is a series of sentences, statements, or propositions some of which are called premises and one is the conclusion. The purpose of an argument is to give reasons for one's conclusion via justification, explanation, and/or persua ...

of a

transitive verb A transitive verb is a verb that entails one or more transitive objects, for example, 'enjoys' in ''Amadeus enjoys music''. This contrasts with intransitive verbs, which do not entail transitive objects, for example, 'arose' in ''Beatrice arose ...

, but not with the single argument of an

intransitive verb In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb, aside from an auxiliary verb, whose context does not entail a transitive object. That lack of an object distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Add ...

. Such a situation, which is quite rare among the world's languages, has also been called a ''double- oblique'' clause structure. Rushani, an Iranian dialect, has this alignment in the past tense. That is, in the past tense (or perhaps

perfective aspect The perfective aspect ( abbreviated ), sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect that describes an action viewed as a simple whole, i.e., a unit without interior composition. The perfective aspect is distinguished from the ...

), the agent and object of a transitive verb are marked with the same case ending, while the subject of an intransitive verb is not marked. In the present tense, the object of the transitive verb is marked, the other two roles are not – that is, a typical nominative–accusative alignment.J.R. Payne, 'Language Universals and Language Types', in Collinge, ed. 1990. ''An Encyclopedia of Language''. Routledge. From Payne, 1980. According to Payne, it's clear what happened here: Rushani once had a split-ergative alignment, as is common in the area, where the object was marked (oblique) in the present tense, but the agent was marked in the past. The case forms of the object were then leveled, and with the marking applied to the past tense as well. However, this resulted in a complication, the typologically unusual situation where the agent and object are treated the same, and different from the intransitive subject. Given its rarity, one might expect such a system to be unstable, and indeed it appears to be changing. Payne reports that younger speakers change the past-tense construction to one of the following, either using the absolutive (= nominative) inflection for the agent: or secondarily marking the object as an object, using the preposition ''az'' (literally 'from'):

References

Grammatical cases {{Ling-morph-stub

See also

References