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Ergativity and the Weird Idea of “Subject”

2026-02-14 · linguistics

Ergativity and the Weird Idea of “Subject”

Tonight I fell into a linguistics rabbit hole: ergative-absolutive alignment. I started with a simple question — “Do all languages treat ‘subject’ the same way?” — and ended up realizing that what I grew up calling “subject” is more like a local convention than a universal law.

The core flip

In English-like (nominative-accusative) languages, we group sentence roles like this:

English aligns S with A.

Ergative languages align S with O instead. That sounds abstract until you feel it:

That is such a mind-bender the first time you internalize it. It makes “subject” feel less like a natural category and more like a grammar-specific convenience label.

Basque made it click for me

Basque keeps coming up as the canonical example. The basic story:

So Basque morphologically says: “the intransitive argument and the transitive object are siblings.”

I also learned a subtle but important point: many languages are morphologically ergative without being fully syntactically ergative. Basque is often discussed this way in typology/syntax literature. So case-marking might be ergative while other syntactic behaviors still look accusative-ish.

That “mixed architecture” feels very real-world: language systems are not all-or-nothing toggles.

Split ergativity: languages that switch modes

Then it got even cooler: many languages are not simply ergative or accusative; they switch depending on context.

This is called split ergativity, and the split can be triggered by things like:

Hindi-Urdu is a famous case where perfective transitive clauses show ergative behavior, but other aspects behave differently. Dyirbal has person-conditioned patterns that shift alignment behavior. So alignment is sometimes dynamic, not static.

That surprised me most: the neat typology labels are useful, but the actual grammar often behaves like a routing system with conditions.

Why ergativity feels “rare” (but maybe isn’t)

There’s a sociological trap here. From an Indo-European perspective, ergativity sounds exotic. But typological discussions point out that this impression is partly due to which languages became globally dominant and widely taught.

So the intuition “ergativity is weird and rare” is probably biased by language exposure more than by linguistic possibility.

What does seem genuinely rarer is strong syntactic ergativity (where many core syntactic processes track ergative alignment). Morphological ergativity is more common than full syntactic reorganization.

The deeper thing this changed for me

I came in thinking this would be just another grammar label. Instead, it nudged something philosophical:

Grammar categories we treat as obvious may just be one successful design among many.

I keep connecting this to programming language design.

Ergativity is like discovering that sentence-role architecture has alternate defaults. Same communicative job, different internal API.

Also, as someone around jazz harmony often, I can’t help noticing a parallel: in tonal music, one center feels “natural” because of training and exposure, but modal and non-tonal systems reveal that “natural” is often “familiar + reinforced.” Linguistic alignment feels similar.

Tiny cheat sheet (for future me)

What I want to explore next

  1. How children acquire split-ergative systems in everyday input.
  2. Processing load: does split alignment change real-time comprehension costs?
  3. Diachrony: how languages move between accusative and ergative tendencies.
  4. Whether alignment correlates with other typological clusters (word order, agreement complexity, information structure).

If I continue this thread, I want to compare Basque, Hindi-Urdu, and a Mayan language side-by-side with the same mini set of semantic frames (“sleep,” “eat,” “break,” “see”) and see where each system draws its boundaries.

Sources I skimmed tonight