Talk:Nominative–accusative alignment

message: what is this on about? I don't understand a WORD! surely an encyclopaedia is supposed to be something for those that don't alrerady have a PHD in the subject! :S
:I offer you my heartfelt empathy. Although I understand what this article tries to explain, a HUGE portion of it entails unfortunate and/or misleading use of taxons, mistaken assumptions about certain grammatical origins, and convoluted examples. Here is my humble attempt at a bit of clarity: A nominative-accusative language relates to a language that is marked by the following order -
:*1. A nominative subject (i.e., a person or thing that occurs at the head of a sentence).
:*2. An accusative verb (i.e. a transitive verb) that complements the nominative subject.
:*3. An accusative object (i.e., a person or thing) that is expressed by the accusative verb.
:Here are some parsed examples:
:* "I want candy." (I = nominative subject; want = accusative verb; candy = accusative object)
:* "We enjoy this." (We = nominative subject/subject pronoun; enjoy = accusative verb; this = accusative object/demonstrative object pronoun)
:* "Read my lips." (YOU as implicit nominative subject; read = accusative verb; my lips = accusative object/accusative noun phrase)
:* "John saw what you did." (John = nominative subject; saw = accusative verb; what you did = accusative object clause)
:* "I believe that today is Tuesday." (I= nominative subject; believe = accusative verb; that today is Tuesday = accusative object clause)
:Perhaps you wonder how accusative differs from transitive. Essentially, transitive applies only to the operation of verbs but accusative applies not only to that but also to the operation of prepositions. Thus, "I watch movies on weekends" is parsed as "I" = nominative subject, "watch" = accusative/transitive verb, "movies" = accusative/transitive object, "on" = preposition (which, by definition, is accusative), and "weekends" = prepositional/accusative object.
:If I had an infinite amount of time and better inclination, I would substitute the lead paragraph of this article with the foregoing explanation. However, doing so would require a wholesale reconciliation of the article's remainder as well. Presently, I'm not enterprising enough to undertake such a vast project.
:I hope some of this helps someone. Peace.
: Kent Dominic 01:12, 26 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: what is this on about?

message: A discussion of the distribution (presumably 'geographical distribution') of nominative accusative languages is potentially interesting, but as written this section could be significantly improved. Some suggestions:
1. There is actually no discussion of 'distribution', just a list of languages. It would be nice to have an actual discussion of the distribution (maybe world-wise vs. the more restricted distribution of ergative-absolutive?) and an overt reference to the accompanying map.
2. It's unclear on what basis the list nom-acc was created or what it is meant to show -- it seems like a random list. It would be nice if the list were chosen on some principled basis and that basis explained. Maybe get rid of the list entirely it is not possible to make the relevance of the list clearer?
3. The location of the 'Distribution' section really breaks up the flow of the discussion of the grammatical characteristics of nom-acc systems for me. Maybe move this 'distribution' section to after the grammatical discussion?
Ldmanthroling (talk) 16:25, 26 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Distribution 

message: I thought this section was really good as far as it went. The example of conjunction reduction was very well done, especially in showing what we could expect to see were English an ergative-absolutive language. You mention several other syntactic processes that are affected by alignment system (subject-controlled subject deletion, object-controlled subject deletion, Raising). I think it would be great if you had examples of these that were as clear as your conjunction reduction example.
Mmjacobs (talk) 19:11, 26 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Syntactic accusativity 

message: I am very impressed with the breadth of examples in this article, as well as the section at the end about relevant theory. I feel that this section could possibly be brought further to the front of the article, maybe after 'distribution', because it seems to deal with more overarching linguistic issues, i.e. why languages demonstrate this order, whereas details in the implementation of nom-acc should come later. I would also like to see a few more examples - maybe one for Differential Subject Marking, because I'm a little confused as to how this fits in with case marking and DOM as mentioned in its explanatory paragraph. – Vanessa (talk) 00:54, 27 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: General comments

message: I think the distinction between these two language alignments was presented rather quickly, even though I feel it is a major aspect of understanding nominative-accusative language structure. I feel that the explanation of the differing codings systems was unclear and difficult to understand without very close reading. I think this section would be much stronger and more beneficial with examples that actually demonstrate the coding systems you refer to - such as morphological case marking that can represent shared/different alignments between S, V, and O. 
Skang03 (talk) 02:50, 28 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nominative-accusative vs. ergative-absolutive 

message: A minor point: The references are not all in the same bibliographic style. It would be good to render them uniform. 24.5.243.88 (talk) 13:58, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  References 

message: The discussion of differential object marking makes me think of a perhaps more common typological topic that is not mentioned on this page, namely which of the two relations gets marked in morphological case systems. Its not unusual for only one of the relations to be overtly marked, while the other is unmarked. In Quechuan languages, for example, one finds that the accusative is marked with the suffix -ta, while the nominative is unmarked. This is the most common pattern, but definitely not the only one. You can find a nice introductory discussion of this issue at the World Atlas of Language Structures (http://wals.info/), which is where, incidentally, the pretty map on this page is originally from.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ldmanthroling (talk • contribs) 14:06, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  marking of nominative and/or accusative 

message: The 'conception of the subject' section is very hard to understand. What does 'continuity' mean here. Ldmanthroling (talk) 14:16, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Relevant theory