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In an ergative–absolutive system, S and O are one group and contrast with A. The English language represents a typical nominative–accusative system (accusative for short). The name derived from the nominative and accusative cases. Basque is an ergative–absolutive system (or simply ergative). The name stemmed from the ergative and ...
The word subject, as it is typically defined in grammars of nominative–accusative languages, has a different application when referring to ergative–absolutive languages, or when discussing morphosyntactic alignment in general. Ergative languages tend to be either verb-final or verb-initial; there are few, if any, ergative SVO languages. [4]
In intransitive clauses, the subject can either be represented by a set A-person marker, or a set B-person marker, depending on aspect. In perfective aspect, Chol has ergative–absolutive alignment: the subject of the intransitive verb is expressed by a suffixed person marker, thus in the same way as the object of transitive verbs.
In linguistic typology, active–stative alignment (also split intransitive alignment or semantic alignment) is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the sole argument ("subject") of an intransitive clause (often symbolized as S) is sometimes marked in the same way as an agent of a transitive verb (that is, like a subject such as "I" or "she" in English) but other times in the same way ...
This is in contrast with nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive alignment languages, in which the argument of an intransitive verb patterns with either the agent argument of the transitive (in accusative languages) or with the patient argument of the transitive (in ergative languages). Thus, whereas in English, "she" in "she runs ...
Chao believes that ergative (= middle voice) verb is a distinct syntactic verb category. In other words, it isn't purely transitive or intransitive. However, Li et al. (1981), when arguing against Chao's analysis of Mandarin, stated that there is a distinct class of middle voice verbs.
Basque is a language isolate with a polypersonal verbal system comprising two sub-types of verbs, synthetic and analytical. The following three cases are cross-referenced on the verb: the absolutive (the case for the subject of intransitive verbs and the direct objects of transitive verbs), the ergative (the case for the subject of transitive verbs), and the dative (the case for the indirect ...
The distinction drawn here between ergative and object-deletion verbs is based on the role of the subject. The object of a transitive ergative verb is the subject of the corresponding intransitive ergative verb. With object-deletion verbs, in contrast, the subject is consistent regardless of whether an object is or is not present.