Interesting morphosyntactic alignment

[TehranHamburger]

Was sort of brainstorming with a friend. We got three verbal arguments: topic, ergative, accusative.

Intransitive clause always goes with the topic argument.

Transitive clause aligns either the topic with the agent or with the patient depending on well, which is the topic of the sentence. So you get:

cat-TPC eats mouse-ACC <-> the cat eats the mouse
mouse-TPC eats cat-ERG <-> the mouse is eaten by the cat
cat-ERG eats mouse-ACC -> ERROR, does not occur

It's a bit like polynesian austronesian alignment now that I think of it except austronesian alignment makes the acc and erg the topic and calls the topic argument the direct argument. It also requires you to actually change a voice on the verb.

[decemviro]

True! In fact, isn't this similar to Japanese? Except they do nom-acc with topic marking and can easily mark subject without topic? Well, they can but in some cases sounds a little awkward.

In any case, quite interesting!

[clawgrip]

This seems interesting, but no, it is not really similar to Japanese at all. The topic in Japanese is not at all restricted to being the agent or patient of the verb, it is not a required part of the clause, and agent and patient marked as nominative and accusative can and often do appear within a single clause.

[decemviro]

Very true, that's what I meant with similar but not the same. In Japanese you can have TOP-ACC and also TOP-NOM, but of course, also NOM-ACC and TOP-NOM-ACC hehe. Also it's Verb final. But I only meant the first two.

But yes, you are right.