The diachrony of morphosyntactic alignment

Zúñiga, Fernando (2018). The diachrony of morphosyntactic alignment. Language and linguistics compass, 12(9), e12300. Wiley 10.1111/lnc3.12300

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With morphological and syntactic argument properties,
some arguments behave alike (i.e., they align with each
other) while others do not. Such alignment patterns
have received significant attention in the literature,
but claims as to their origin and development are sometimes
difficult to assess, due to scant actual data. This
paper surveys the main hypotheses proposed in early
and recent work on the topic, focusing on alignment
type change and on major alignment types (ergativity,
accusativity, and split intransitivity) of morphological
properties, with some remarks on syntactic properties.
The survey shows that alignment type change may
often occur when clauses denoting low transitivity are
reanalyzed as clauses of either higher or lower syntactic
valency, sometimes even introducing a partition in the
verbal lexicon (occasionally being conditioned by
semantic, pragmatic, or structural factors), or are
extended from low‐transitivity predicates to most bivalent
predicates. Lastly, alignment type change can be
either functionally motivated or not.

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