In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between arguments—specifically, between the two arguments (in English, subject and object) of transitive verbs like the dog chased the cat, and the single argument of intransitive verbs like the cat ran away.
Listed below are argument roles used by Bickel and Nichols for the description of alignment types.
[3] Their taxonomy is based on semantic roles and valency (the number of arguments controlled by a predicate).
The term locus refers to a location where the morphosyntactic marker reflecting the syntactic relations is situated.
A few Australian languages, such as Diyari, are split among accusative, ergative, and tripartite alignment, depending on animacy.
A popular idea, introduced in Anderson (1976),[7] is that some constructions universally favor accusative alignment while others are more flexible.
Moreover, it avoids the terms "agent" and "patient", which are semantic roles that do not correspond consistently to particular arguments.
Japanese – by contrast – marks nouns by following them with different particles which indicate their function in the sentence: kodomo gachild NOMStsuitaarrivedVERBintrans{kodomo ga} tsuita{child NOM} arrivedS VERBintrans'The child arrived.