Talk:Morphosyntactic alignment

message: I have added information on extremally interesting (but little known) typology created by a Polish linguist in 1960s.
--Grzegorj 18:19, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Milewski's typology 

message: Is there such a thing (or is it just another way of saying the 'accusative case')?  Link is needed regardless. - IstvanWolf 14:16, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Not sure in warrants its own article, though it wouldn't hurt. Rushani has one case for intransitive verbs, and a second for transitive verbs for both agent and patient - rather like a combined ergative + accusative. kwami 02:41, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Transitive case? 

message: The article was getting grammatical role (S, A and P) horrifically mixed up with semantic role (agent and patient). I have tried to clean this up by removing as much semantic role terminology as I could. A =/= agent, P =/= patient! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 82.33.156.75 (talk) 16:44, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleaned up 

message: I have added some nice graphics, that can improve this article a bit, I hope.
:--dnik (talk) 00:02, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Added some graphics 

message: Ideally the article should also treat how the indirect objects of ditransitive verbs are marked in various languages, vis-a-vis A, P, and S; and how genitives or construct states are marked relative to other cases in various languages. --Jim Henry (talk) 22:10, 12 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you have some references discussing these  topics that we can draw on? --JWB (talk) 01:49, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: There are references in the ditransitive verb article itself for some of this; maybe some of the text there, and its corresponding references, could be copied here and abridged.  As for genitive alignment, see this CONLANG list message and the books and articles referenced in said post. --Jim Henry (talk) 23:45, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ditransitive and genitive/construct state alignment 

message: I'd like to call attention for the odd phrase "Note that while the grammatical role labels S, A, and O/P are originally short for "subject", "agent", and "object/patient", the concepts are distinct both from "subject" and "object" (the terms that S, A and O supersede (so the label of 'object' supersedes itself?) and from "Agent" and "patient" (which indicate thematic relations, not grammatical relations: an A need (absence of third person 's') not be an agent, an O need (absence of third person 's') not be a patient)."  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.46.210.43 (talk) 22:23, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: No, O is not "object". But I removed the word 'supersede' when I reworded for the next complaint. — kwami (talk) 10:43, 15 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Odd sentence 

message: At the beginning of the section, in the first paragraph, it's written:
″Transitive verbs have two core arguments, labelled A (the more active or in-control) and O, which in a language like English are subject (A) and object (O). Intransitive verbs have a single core argument, labelled S, which in English (but not in all languages) is also a subject.″
So according to this paragraph, transitive verb sentences take A and O, while intransitive verb sentences take only S.
But then further down, in the fourth paragraph, an example is given of the English verb "moved", and the usage of A/O/S is contrary to paragraph one!
″The best-known system is the English type, with a distinct O (object). These are called nominative–accusative languages, or just accusative languages, after the nominative and accusative cases, which are how A/S and O are distinguished in Latin. The best known of the other systems is the ergative system, named after the ergative case, which is how A is marked in many languages (such as Inuit and Basque) which distinguishes A from S/O. An example in English of a verb used in the ergative case is the verb "moved" in the two sentences “John moved the stone,” and “The stone moved.” In the first sentence, since the subject (S) (John) performs the verb upon the object (O) (the stone), the verb (moved) is transitive. In the second sentence, however, the stone becomes the subject (A), which performs the verb, and the object disappears, and thus, because the verb does not take a direct object, it is intransitive. ...″
In the example of "John moved the stone" and "the stone moved", the transitive sentence is said to take S and O, while the intransitive is said to take A!
Can someone please clarify which label system is correct, and change paragraphs 1 and 4 to match up with each other. Thank you.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jclu (talk • contribs) 02:43, 24 June 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  A/O/S being confused under "Semantics and grammatical relations" section 

message: The following book is on a more specialized subfield of alignment, but it might be instructive nevertheless. It is an Open Access Book, which is good, but I am not sure in how far it is on topic, so I leave it for other people to decide whether or not to add it to the external links
"A typology of marked-S languages"
Corinna Handschuh
http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/18
A typological study of the rare marked-S language type which overtly marks the single argument of intransitive verbs (S) while one of the arguments of transitive verbs (either A or P) is left zero-coded. The formal (overt versus zero-coding) as well as functional aspects (range of uses of individual case forms) of the phenomenon are treated. The book covers languages from the Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan languages of Africa and of the North America Pacific Northwest and Pacific regions.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.133.5.142 (talk) 12:34, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  A Typology of Marked-S languages 

message: From the article:
An example in English of a verb used in the ergative case is the verb "moved" in the two sentences “John moved the stone,” and “The stone moved.” In the first sentence, since the subject (A) (John) performs the verb upon the object (O) (the stone), the verb (moved) is transitive. In the second sentence, however, the stone becomes the subject (S), which performs the verb, and the object disappears, and thus, because the verb does not take a direct object, it is intransitive. Therefore, the verb "moved" is an ergative verb because it can be used both transitively and intransitively.
Firstly "a verb used in the ergative case" doesn't seem to make sense, nouns have case not verbs. Assuming it means "a verb used with the ergative case", it's still not correct - there's no ergative case here, there's a subject case (used for both A (John) and S (the stone in the intransitive sentence)) and an object case (used for O (the stone in the transitive sentence)). The final sentence says "moved" is called an ergative verb because it can be used both transitively and intransitively which may be true but is irrelevant to this article.
I am going to delete the entire example. --Yym (talk) 10:14, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  "moved" example seems incorrect/out of place