Ergative accusative language
An ergative accusative language (English. Tripartite language "three-part language") is a language that marks the subject of an intransitive sentence, the subject of a transitive sentence and the object of a transitive sentence differently. If the language has a system of morphological cases , the different syntactic functions are designated as follows:
- the subject of an intransitive sentence through the absolute
- the subject of a transitive sentence through the ergative
- the object of a transitive sentence by the accusative
Languages without case marking express these distinctions, for example, through the word order .
A language with an ergative-accusative alignment is, for example, the Nez Percé , an indigenous North American language . Here the absolute represents the basic form, the ergative is marked with the suffix -nim and the accusative with -ne .
Another example: Hindi / Urdu in the perfect if the patient is certain :
- लड़के ने औरत को देखा है / لڑکے نے عورت کو دیکھا ہے
- laṛke -ne aurat -ko dekh-ā hai
- Junge- erg. Sg Frau- acc see- ptcp aux . 3 sg
- '(The) boy saw the woman'
Ergative-accusative languages are extremely rare among the languages of the world.