The syntax of Philippine-type alignment: Insights from case-marking

• Published in: Natural language and linguistic theory Vol. 43; no. 3; pp. 1839 - 1898
• Main Author: Chen, Victoria
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.08.2025; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Alignment; Austronesian languages; Case marking; Debates; Grammatical case; Infinitives; Linguistics; Morphology; Natural Language Processing (NLP); Personal names; Philippine languages; Philosophy of Language; Social Sciences; Syncretism; Syntactic movement; Syntax; Topics; Valence; Voice (Grammatical); Philippine-type alignment; Syntactic ergativity; Discourse-configurational language; Austronesian-type voice; Antipassive

Despite the apparent hallmarks of syntactic ergativity found in Philippine-type Austronesian languages, a closer look at the distribution of three basic case markers reveals that their ergative characteristics are only illusory. Support for an accusative view firstly comes from the presence of the p...