syntactic alignment
Sentence structure matching
Syntactic alignment is a grammatical pattern in which a language treats certain noun phrases the same way across different sentence types.
Languages are classified by how they align the subject of an intransitive verb with either the agent or patient of a transitive verb—yielding nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive, or other alignment systems.
The concept helps linguists compare how languages organize grammatical relationships.
- agreementShared position between parties
- accusativeCase for direct objects
- nominativeCase marking sentence subjects
- subjectMatter under discussion
- objectTangible entity or aim
verb · morphology · typology · cross-linguistic · constituent · dependent · head · pattern · mapping · parallel · correspondence · agent · patient · pivot · hierarchy · split · construction · parsing
- grammatical alignmentergative-absolutive, tripartite, DOM, DSM
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