Prerequisites
This article assumes you know what morphosyntactic alignment is. If you don’t, see the video on this subject, Ergativity: Her Likes She, or read about it on Wikipedia.
The following terms will be used in this article:
- Agent (A) is the agent of a transitive verb.
- Object (O) is the object of a transitive verb.
- Subject (S) is the sole argument of an intransitive verb.
Introduction
In nominative and ergative languages, the agent and object NPs of a transitive verb are marked, either morphologically or through syntactic order. That way, by looking at how the NPs are marked, you can tell which NP is the subject and which is the object.
For example, in the English sentence “I see you,” you know that “I” is the agent and “you” is the object because agents of transitive verbs always precede the verb and objects come after.
In a direct-inverse language, none of the NPs are marked. If English were a direct-inverse language, all the following sentences would mean the same thing:
- I see you
- You see I
- I you see
- You I see
- etc.
This raises the question: if all NPs are marked the same, how do you tell which one is the agent and which one is the object?
NP hierarchy
The answer is that the NPs are organized into a hierarchy, usually a hierarchy of animacy or salience. The NP that is higher on the hierarchy is the agent, and the other NP is the object.
If, in our direct-inverse version of English, we have a hierarchy such as:
- 1st person NPs
- 2nd person NPs
- 3rd person NPs
In our direct-inverse version of English, no matter what order the NPs come in the sentences “I see you” or “You see I,” you always know that “I” is the agent because it is higher on the hierarchy than “you,” and therefore “you” is the object.
But what if the seeing goes the other way around? What happens if you want the lower-ranking NP to be the agent?
Inverse marker
To make a lower-ranking NP the agent, direct-inverse languages use an inverse marker, which is usually affixed to the verb. The inverse marker inverts the hierarchy for that verb, so the NP that is normally lower-ranked is now the agent.
| Direct-inverse English | Regular English |
|---|---|
| You I see- |
You see me |
| You I see | I see you |
Distinguishing between 3rd person arguments
If you have two 3rd person arguments, like “dog” and “bone,” how do you know which one is the agent and object?
Real direct-inverse languages have more complicated hierarchies than the 1st>2nd>3rd person hierarchy we used before, which help disambiguate between 3rd person agents and objects.
- Animacy: Many direct-inverse languages rank animate NPs higher than inanimate NPs, so the animate NP is the agent.
- Proximate-obviative marking: Many direct-inverse languages have a way of marking third-person NPs as more salient (proximate) or less salient (obviative), and the proximate NP outranks the obviative NP. Thus the proximate NP is the agent.