Morphosyntactic alignment

Georgian syntax and verb agreement are those of a nominative-accusative language. That is, the subject of an intransitive verb and the subject of a transitive verb are treated alike when it comes to word order within the sentence and their agreement marks in the verb complex. Nominative-accusative alignment is the most common in the world's languages, and is found in all Western Indo-European languages (such as English language, German, and French). However, Georgian case morphology (that is, the declension of nouns using case marks) ...

See also:

Georgian grammar, Georgian grammar - Morphosyntactic alignment, Georgian grammar - Case system, Georgian grammar - Nouns, Georgian grammar - Pluralization, Georgian grammar - Pronouns, Georgian grammar - Adjectives, Georgian grammar - Possessive adjectives, Georgian grammar - Adpositions, Georgian grammar - Examples, Georgian grammar - Verbal system, Georgian grammar - Verb classes, Georgian grammar - Screeves, Georgian grammar - Verb components, Georgian grammar - Auxiliary verbs, Georgian grammar - Syntax, Georgian grammar - Word order, Georgian grammar - Questions, Georgian grammar - Negation

Read more here: » Georgian grammar: Encyclopedia II - Georgian grammar - Morphosyntactic alignment

Ergative languages are in contrast to nominative-accusative languages (such as English), which treat the object of transitive verbs distinctly from the subject of both transitive and intransitive verbs. These different arguments can be symbolized as follows: O = object of transitive verb (also symbolized as P) Sintrans = subject of intransitive verb (also symbolized as S) Strans = subject o ...

See also:

Morphosyntactic alignment, Morphosyntactic alignment - Semantics & grammatical relations, Morphosyntactic alignment - Ergative vs. accusative, Morphosyntactic alignment - Milewski's typology, Morphosyntactic alignment - Bibliography

Read more here: » Morphosyntactic alignment: Encyclopedia II - Morphosyntactic alignment - Ergative vs. accusative

Here is a list of the major theta roles, using the example sentence, Debra broke the window with a bat and Jack fell asleep. The agent (A) is whoever is intentionally carrying out some action. In the first example sentence, Debra is the agent. The experiencer (S) is someone/thing who experiences some state. Thus, in Jack fell asleep, Jack is the experiencer. This is because Jack is not an agent, in that he did not "fall himself asleep". One semantic test used to distinguish the ...

See also:

Theta role, Theta role - Major theta roles, Theta role - Relationship of syntax to theta roles, Theta role - Uniqueness

Read more here: » Theta role: Encyclopedia II - Theta role - Major theta roles

English has a number of generally ditransitive verbs, such as give and grant, and many transitive verbs that can take an additional argument (commonly a beneficiary or target of the action), such as pass, read, bake, etc.: He gave Mary ten dollars. He passed Paul the ball. Jean read him the books. She is baking him a cake. English grammar allows for these sentences to be written alternately with a preposition (to or for): He gave ten dollars to Mary. ...

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Ditransitive verb, Ditransitive verb - English usage, Ditransitive verb - Passive voice, Ditransitive verb - Attributive ditransitive verbs, Ditransitive verb - Ditransitive/monotransitive alignment

Read more here: » Ditransitive verb: Encyclopedia II - Ditransitive verb - English usage

Active languages are a relatively new field of study; in other times active alignment was not recognized as such, and was mostly treated as an interesting deviation from the standard alternatives (nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive). Besides, active languages are few, and they often show complications and special cases ("pure" active alignment is an ideal). Therefore, the terminology used to describe them is rather flexible. Active languages are also termed active-stative or even nominative-absolutive. The terms agentive case and patientive case used above are descriptive, but not ...

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Active-stative language, Active-stative language - Terminology, Active-stative language - Examples of active languages

Read more here: » Active-stative language: Encyclopedia II - Active-stative language - Terminology

The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of (some or all) prepositions. The accusative case exists (or existed once) in all the Indo-European languages (including Latin, Sanskrit, Greek, German, Russian), in the Finno-Ugric languages, and in Semitic languages (such as Arabic). It should be noted that Balto-Fennic languages such as Finnish and Estonian have two cases to mark objects, the accusative ...

Including:

• Accusative case - Example
• Accusative case - The case in Latin

Read more here: » Accusative case: Encyclopedia - Accusative case

Georgian (spoken in the former Soviet republic of Georgia) is often termed an ergative language, but it shows many complications of this basic pattern, including active alignment in some verb paradigms. Tsova-Tush, a Caucasian language is an active language. According to Holinsky (1987), there are 31 verbs where the subject is always marked as patientive and refer to uncontrollable states ("be hungry", "tremble", etc.), and 78 verbs with an agentive subject ("walk", "talk", "think"); these form a split-S set (the marking of the subjec ...

See also:

Active-stative language, Active-stative language - Terminology, Active-stative language - Examples of active languages

Read more here: » Active-stative language: Encyclopedia II - Active-stative language - Examples of active languages

In languages such as English which rely heavily on word order and use frequent passivization, identification of theta roles from merely syntactic clues is often impossible. In more heavily case-marked languages, however, more information is often encoded syntactically. Many languages, for instance, have an instrumental case, which explicitly marks the instrument of a sentence. However, in such languages the instrumental case m ...

See also:

Theta role, Theta role - Major theta roles, Theta role - Relationship of syntax to theta roles, Theta role - Uniqueness

Read more here: » Theta role: Encyclopedia II - Theta role - Relationship of syntax to theta roles

In the sentence I see the car, the noun phrase the car is the direct object of the verb "see". In English, which has mostly lost the case system, the definite article and noun — "the car" — remain in the same form regardless of the grammatical role played by the words. One can correctly use "the car" as the subject of a sentence also: "The car is parked here." In a declined language, the morphology of the article and/or noun changes in some way according to the grammatical role played by the noun in a given se ...

See also:

Accusative case, Accusative case - Example, Accusative case - The case in Latin

Read more here: » Accusative case: Encyclopedia II - Accusative case - Example

Less widely known yet worth mention is a similar classification proposed in the 1960's by the Polish linguist Tadeusz Milewski. In this classification active and tripartite languages were omitted because they were little known at that time. Milewski proposed a division of languages into 6 groups, based upon consideration of 4 main syntactic relationships; these were: (1) the relationship of the experiencer to the verb, (2) the relationship of the agent to the verb, (3) the relations ...

See also:

Morphosyntactic alignment, Morphosyntactic alignment - Semantics & grammatical relations, Morphosyntactic alignment - Ergative vs. accusative, Morphosyntactic alignment - Milewski's typology, Morphosyntactic alignment - Bibliography

Read more here: » Morphosyntactic alignment: Encyclopedia II - Morphosyntactic alignment - Milewski's typology

Semantic roles (aka theta-roles): Agent Patient Grammatical relations: Subject Object Oblique Transitive verbs usually have two arguments, subject and object. Intransitive verbs have a single argument, the subject. In this regard, most languages group two of the arguments and leave the other apart in terms of distinction. That is, of the three possible arguments, two are treated the same, and the other is treated ...

See also:

Morphosyntactic alignment, Morphosyntactic alignment - Semantics & grammatical relations, Morphosyntactic alignment - Ergative vs. accusative, Morphosyntactic alignment - Milewski's typology, Morphosyntactic alignment - Bibliography

Read more here: » Morphosyntactic alignment: Encyclopedia II - Morphosyntactic alignment - Semantics & grammatical relations