#morphosyntactic alignment

For Kshafa I want to have a more complicated morphosyntactic alignment than what I had for Ngįout, which was marked nominative, but otherwise just plain vanilla nominative accusative. What I had come up with was inspired mainy by what I'd read about alignment in Majang, which is a complicated variant of tripartite fluid-S, in which the subject is nominative if it's "topical/expected", and ergative if not.

This whole split based on pragmatics is a bit too complicated for me, so I decided that for Kshafa the split is going to be based on the definiteness of the subject. If the subject is definite it is nominative, and if it is indefinite it is ergative in transitive clauses and absolutive in indefinite clauses.

The diachronic explenation I have for this to make it make sense in my mind is that originally it was an ergative fluid S language that is based on definiteness - transitive clauses are ergative, intransitive clauses are fluid. Then, a kind of focal definite demonstrative article thing stuck to a definite ergative argument and the nominative case was made.

In addition, another part of the system (that was also inspired form Majang) is that the verb agrees with the definiteness of the subject, and because Kshafa has can be pro-drop, it can distinguish between intransitive clauses and transitive clauses with a dropped agent. Some examples:

A dog runs - run.3SG dog.ABS

The dog runs - run.3SG.DEF dog.NOM

A boy is being bitten - bite.3SG boy.ABS

The (known thing) bites the boy - bite.3SG.DEF boy.ABS

smth bites the dog - bite.3SG.DEF dog.ABS

A dog bites a boy - bite.3SG boy.ABS dog.ERG

The dog bites a boy - bite.3SG.DEF boy.ABS dog. NOM

Final thing is that nominative arguments can be freely fronted, so:

The dog bites a boy - bite.3SG.DEF boy.ABS dog. NOM => dog.NOM bite.3SG.DEF boy.ABS

Sure thing!

Languages can be classified in many ways. Some of these involve history and genetic relationship (e.g. language families); some involve syntax (e.g. SVO vs SOV languages); some involve sounds (e.g. CV structure); and some involve more subtle aspects of morphology and grammar. One way that languages can be classified is by alignment. Today we’ll talk about two alignments.

One, with which English speakers (and speakers of most major modern languages) should be familiar, is called nominative alignment. This means that the subject of a transitive sentence and the subject of an intransitive sentence are treated the same — e.g. “I eat” and “I eat the wild boar” — while the object of a transitive sentence is treated differently — “The wild boar eats me.” This distinction in English is both in form (for pronouns: I vs me, he vs him, etc.) and in position: the subject comes before the verb and the object comes after.

Sumerian has what is called ergative alignment. This means that the subject of an intransitive sentence and the object of a transitive sentence are treated identically, while the subject of a transitive sentence is treated differently. In Sumerian, the difference is in case: the first group is in the absolutive case, while the second is in the ergative case.

Take these three sentences as examples:

Lugal gu. “The king eats.”

Lugale shahzeda ib-gu. “The king eats the wild boar.”

Shahzeda lugal in-gu. “The wild boar eats the king.”

Notice how in sentences 1 & 3, lugal appears in the absolutive case, but in sentence 2, it appears in the ergative case (marked by the case ending -e.)

If English operated like this, two of the English examples I gave above would look the same as normal: “I eat the wild boar” and “The wild boar eats me.” The third, however, would look different: “Me eat.”