Tripartite language
An ergative - accusative language (English tripartite language " tripartite language" ) is a language that marks the subject of an intransitive sentence, the subject of a transitive sentence and the object of a transitive sentence differently. The language provides a system of morphological case, the different syntactic functions as follows be referred to:
- The subject of an intransitive sentence by the absolutive
- The subject of a transitive set by the ergative
- The object of a transitive set by the accusative
Languages without case marking bring these distinctions, for example, by the word order expressed.
A language with ergative - accusative alignment, for example, the Nez Percé, an indigenous North American language. Here, the absolutive is the basic form, which is marked with the ergative suffix - nim and the accusative with - ne.
Ergative - accusative languages are extremely rare among the languages of the world.