X-Nico

unusual facts about Nominative–absolutive language


Nominative–absolutive language

A nominative–absolutive language, also called a marked nominative language, is a language with an unusual morphosyntactic alignment similar to, and often considered a subtype of, a nominative–accusative alignment.


Case in tiers

For ergative–absolutive alignment, the direction of assignment is right to left, with absolutive preceding ergative.

For nominative–accusative alignment, the structural cases are assigned from left to right, with nominative case preceding accusative.

Chukchi language

Chukchi is largely agglutinative and has ergative–absolutive alignment.

Ergative case parameter

In linguistics, the ergative case parameter is a proposed parameter that classifies a language as ergative-absolutive or nominative-accusative accordingly to how nouns are declined as subjects or objects of a sentence.

Erromintxela language

Its case marking follows the ergative–absolutive pattern where the subject of an intransitive verb is in the absolutive case (which is unmarked), the same case being used for the direct object of a transitive verb.

Jakaltek language

Like many Native American languages, Jacaltec has a lot of complex agglutinative morphology and uses ergative–absolutive case alignment.

Kabardian language

The absolutive case marks the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb (see ergative languages).

Lari language

There are ergative structure in Lari verbal morphology, which is distinct from Persian.

Linguistic typology

Another common classification distinguishes nominative–accusative languages and ergative–absolutive ones.

Mbula language

Its basic word order is subject–verb–object; it has a nominative–accusative case-marking strategy.

Mixe languages

The morphosyntactic alignment of Mixe is ergative and it also has an obviative system which serves to distinguish between verb participants in reference to its direct–inverse system.

Muinane language

Case marking is nominative–accusative.

Old Saxon grammar

Nouns, pronouns, adjectives and determiners were fully inflected with five grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental), two grammatical numbers (singular and plural) and three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter).

Origin of the Basques

From a grammatical or typological point of view, they share agglutinative, ergative-absolutive languages, with the same system of declension.

Papyrus 110

All other witnesses have εξερχομενοι, a nominative plural participle, normally interpreted as semitism for an imperative (Leave!).

Pashto grammar

In any of the past tenses (simple past, past progressive, present perfect, past perfect), Pashto is an ergative language; i.e., transitive verbs in any of the past tenses agree with the object of the sentence.

Possessive

In German the two sets of forms are quite similar (for example, the genitive of ich "I" is meiner, the corresponding possessive pronoun is also meiner in the masculine singular nominative, and the possessive determiner is mein with various endings).

Southern Yukaghir language

In absence of narrow focus, the system is organised on a nominative–accusative basis; when focused, direct objects and subjects of intransitive verbs are co-aligned (special focus case, special focus agreement).

Split ergativity

Split ergativity is shown by languages that have a partly ergative behaviour, but employ another syntax or morphology—usually accusative—in some contexts.

Winfred P. Lehmann

In his last book (2002), he assembled extensive data from the nominal and verbal systems, from the lexicon, phonology, and syntax of the ancient IE languages, to argue that Pre-Indo-European was active/stative in alignment, rather than nominative/accusative.

Yukaghir languages

In absence of narrow focus, the system is organised on the nominative–accusative basis; when focused, direct objects and subjects of intransitive verbs are co-aligned (special focus case, special focus agreement).


see also