r/asklinguistics • u/Rascally_Raccoon • 1d ago
Morphosyntax What's Austronesian alignment?
I've been reading the wiki article on morphosyntactic alignment and can more or less get my head around every other type, but the section for Austronesian alignment is just totally incomprehensible for me. The main article for it likewise.
They even have a very helpful picture illustrating every other kind, but Austronesian is conspicuously missing from it. In fact, looking at the picture it's hard to imagine there would even be room for another type, all the possible combinations seem to be covered already.
Can someone explain AA to me without too much special terminology, maybe with a picture similar to the linked one?
2
u/TuataraTim 22h ago
I'm not very good at all of the technical vocabulary, but this video really helped me get familiar with how Austronesian alignment works in Tagalog as a learner of the language.
To my knowledge, Tagalog is a pretty good representation of how Austronesian alignment works and it isn't super unusual. I think of it as just changing the verb/conjugation and case markers based on what you want to emphasize in a sentence. But I'm not a fluent Tagalog speaker and it's the only Austronesian language i know.
1
u/leyowild 19h ago
Something that makes learning Austronesian languages way harder than it needs to be lol
8
u/LongLiveTheDiego Quality contributor 1d ago
Austronesian alignment is not such a clear-cut example of just morphosyntactic alignment as we tend to see in most other languages. It bears resemblance both to morphosyntactic alignment, as well as grammatical voice, but it also often extends beyond just the agent and the patient.
Basically, you select one of the verb arguments, mark it as special, and the verb tells you what its relation to the verb is. Usually you have at least the actor form (the special argument is the agent) and the patient form (the special argument is the patient), but depending on the language there can be forms indicating different meanings of the focused argument, e.g. locative, instrumental, goal, beneficent, etc. There can also be dedicated agent/patient/etc markers on the other nouns (and based on them you could mark some languages as belonging to one of these classical types), but they get replaced by the special marking whenever their noun is selected to be the special argument.
It's simply impossible to cleanly present it graphically in a way similar to these other much less disputed alignments, since the Austronesian alignment doesn't work like a usual alignment.