| description | Jan-Wouter Zwart and Charlotte Lindenbergh. 2021. Rethinking alignment typology. In András Bárány, Theresa Biberauer, Jamie Douglas, and Sten Vikner, eds., 2021, Syntactic architecture and its consequences: volume 3, Inside syntax (Open Generative Syntax), p. 23-50. Berlin: Language Science Press. |
| type | Reviewed book chapter. |
| ID | 2021a | 157b | DOI | first version November 19, 2016; final version October 17, 2017 |
| origin | This is a contribution to a Festschrift for Ian Roberts (University of Cambridge). This work grew out of my project Dependency in Universal Grammar, studying dependency relations as a function of syntactic structure. For this paper, we were interested in the manifestation of agreement in different alignment systems, partly in response to Bobaljik's 2008 paper 'Where's phi?'. |
| keywords | case, agreement, alignment, ergativity, typology, completeness |
| summary | Considering the standard typological distinction between ergative and accusative alignment, this article argues that the variety of phenomena suggests the need for a more fine-grained classification of alignment types. We start from the observation that grammatical processes may or may not apply to all the grammatical functions, leading to a basic division in complete and incomplete types. It follows that 'ergative' is just one of 18 alignment types, while some incomplete alignment types that look ergative are in fact different, and closer to the family of accusative types. |
| related |
full text;
157a
Presentations: Konstanz, 05/2014; TIN-dag, 02/2015 Lindenbergh Research Master thesis |
