The criteria tend to be based on the degree of volition, or control over the verbal action exercised by the participant.
For most such languages, the case of the intransitive argument is lexically fixed for each verb, regardless of the actual degree of volition of the subject, but often corresponding to the most typical situation.
In some of these languages, agentive marking encodes a degree of volition or control over the action, with the patientive used as the default case; in others, patientive marking encodes a lack of volition or control, suffering from or being otherwise affected by the action, or sympathy on the part of the speaker, with the agentive used as the default case.
(†) = extinct language According to Castro Alves (2010), a split-S alignment can be safely reconstructed for Proto-Northern Jê finite clauses.
The reconstructed Pre-Proto-Indo-European language,[7] not to be confused with the Proto-Indo-European language, its direct descendant, shows many features known to correlate with active alignment like the animate vs. inanimate distinction, related to the distinction between active and inactive or stative verb arguments.
Even in its descendant languages, there are traces of a morphological split between volitional and nonvolitional verbs, such as a pattern in verbs of perception and cognition where the argument takes an oblique case (called quirky subject), a relic of which can be seen in Middle English methinks or in the distinction between see vs. look or hear vs. listen.
Other possible relics from a structure, in descendant languages of Indo-European, include conceptualization of possession and extensive use of particles.