Morphosyntactic Alignment - Ergativity, Austronesian Alignment and More

Morphosyntactic alignment is often difficult to grasp when you first learn about it, but once you understand it, it is really quite simple. In this video I talk about different ways that languages can indicate who is performing an action and who the action is performed on: nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive, tripartite, neutral, transitive-intransitive, direct-inverse and Austronesian alignment. Many of the sample sentences in this video were taken from Wikipedia. 0:00 Introduction and Background 1:27 The Three Roles 1:58 Nominative-Accusative 3:10 Ergative-Absolutive 4:18 Split Ergativity 5:20 Active-Stative/Split Intransitive 6:06 Tripartite 6:50 Neutral 7:30 Transitive-Intransitive 8:29 Combinations of Alignment 8:53 Direct-Inverse 9:40 Austronesian