Re: THEORY: Alignment of ditransitive with monotransitive case roles.

Hello, everyone.

Reading "Person" by Anna Siewierska of Lancaster University, (2004,
Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics), Chapter 2 "The Typology of
Person Forms", 2.2 "Syntactic Function", 2.2.2 "The Encoding of
Syntactic Function", 2.2.2.2 "Morphological Alignment",
2.2.2.2.2 "Ditransitive Clauses".

Siwierska says six main kinds of Transitive-to-Intransitive alignment
are attested by natlangs; accusative, ergative, active (split-S),
hierarchical, tripartite, and neutral (all three roles -- S, A, & P --
 marked the same).

Crediting Dryer, Croft, and Haspelmath, she says there are also six
main kinds of Ditransitive-to-Monotransitive alignment attested by
natlangs; indirective, secundative, split-P, hierarchical,
tripartite, and neutral.

On page 63 she says:

"All the possible combinations of the major monotransitive and
ditransitive alignment types are attested."

However she does not give an example of each, nor a reference to find
an example of each (she says something about "see note 19", but it
has no information to help.)

The impression one gathers by reading up to that point is that any
combination of non-accusative monotransitive alignment with non-
indirective ditransitive alignment is rare; that "off-brand"
monotransitive alignments tend to go with "standard-brand"
(indirective) ditransitive alignment, and "off-brand" ditransitive
alignments tend to go with "standard-brand" (accusative)
monotransitive alignment.

Does anyone know of a natlang example of each combination of the
alignment types she speaks of?  That would be 36 combinations-of-
types; 11 of them should be "not rare" (either accusative or
indirective), the other 25 are "rare", unless I misread her.

Thank you.

Tom H.C. in MI

Reply