Morphosyntactic Alignment

Different languages exhibit different means of establishing the relationship between the core arguments of predicates by encoding their primitive roles by means of morphological or syntactic features. These primitive roles, as standardized by Dixon[1, p. 6], are as follows:

• S (for Subject) referring to the sole argument of an intransitive predicate
• A (for Agent) referring to the argument of a transitive predicate that is most likely to be relevant to the success of the activity associated with the predicate

• O/P (for either Object or Patient) referring to the other remaining argument of a transitive predicate

  The term Morphosyntactic Alignment, therefore, refers to the alignment or correspondence of the overt realization of these primitive roles to one another either through morphological marking of the arguments or a syntactic one, or a combination of both.

  One should be cautious not to assign semantic roles to S, A, and O, though. They only refer to the syntactic function of the arguments they describe. For instance, in Latin Julius saltat (Julius dances) and Julius aestuat (Julius feels hot), despite both being S, the former verb requires an argument that’s agentive while the latter patientive.

  Thus, there are also some languages, like Manipuri[1, p. 29], where grammatical marking is not automatically assigned to the prototypical S, A, and O roles. Rather, they mark NPs according to their actual semantic role in the given context.