Questions: Case Systems and Their Typological Variation

Question 1

In an ergative-absolutive language, how is the subject of an intransitive verb marked relative to the object of a transitive verb?

• A. The intransitive subject takes the ergative case; the transitive object takes the absolutive case
• B. Both take the absolutive case — ergative-absolutive groups these 'affected' participants together
• C. Both take the nominative case, just as in nominative-accusative languages
• D. The intransitive subject takes the absolutive; the transitive object takes the ergative

Answer: (B)

Ergative-absolutive alignment groups the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs into the absolutive case, while the subject of a transitive verb (the agent) takes the ergative. The conceptual logic is that both the intransitive subject and the transitive object are 'undergoers' or less-agentive participants — the system groups by participant role rather than by syntactic subjecthood. This is the opposite of nominative-accusative, which groups both transitive and intransitive subjects (regardless of agentivity) under nominative.

Question 2

Why do languages with richer case systems tend to have freer word order?

• A. Languages with many cases have smaller vocabularies and therefore need word order variation to express nuance
• B. Because case suffixes carry the relational information (who is agent, who is patient), word position can vary without creating ambiguity
• C. Richer case systems arise only in head-final languages, which happen to have freer ordering by coincidence
• D. Free word order makes case necessary as a compensatory strategy; case richness follows from word-order freedom, not the reverse

Answer: (B)

Case marking encodes the grammatical and semantic relationships between noun phrases. When a suffix reliably signals 'this NP is the agent' regardless of its position in the sentence, scrambling word order does not produce ambiguity. English, which has almost no case marking, relies heavily on fixed SVO order to signal these relations — 'the dog bit the man' vs. 'the man bit the dog' differ only in position. Latin, with its rich case system, allowed essentially free ordering of major constituents without loss of clarity. This is one of the cleaner typological correlations in the literature.

Question 3

A single case form in a language can legitimately encode multiple distinct semantic functions — for example, instrument, agent, source, and location.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

Polyfunctionality is the norm, not the exception. The Latin ablative is the textbook example: it serves as an instrument ('with a sword'), passive agent ('by Caesar'), source ('from Rome'), location ('in the forum'), and comparative ('better than gold'). These functions are semantically related through grammaticalization history but are not reducible to a single primitive meaning. This has an important implication: parsing a case form correctly requires knowing the surrounding clause structure and lexical semantics — not just the case label. Students who learn 'ablative = instrument' miss this polyfunctional reality.

Question 4

In an ergative-absolutive language, the subject of a transitive verb and the subject of an intransitive verb are marked with the same case form.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This is the nominative-accusative pattern, not the ergative-absolutive pattern. In ergative-absolutive languages, the subject of a transitive verb (the agent) takes the *ergative* case — a special form reserved for agents of transitive actions — while the subject of an intransitive verb takes the *absolutive*, grouping it with the transitive object. This is the defining feature of ergative alignment and represents a fundamentally different way of grammatically categorizing participants in events. The confusion arises from applying nominative-accusative intuitions to all case systems.

Question 5

What is the key conceptual difference between nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive alignment, and what does each system group together?

Model answer: Nominative-accusative alignment groups subjects together regardless of transitivity: both the subject of a transitive verb ('she saw him') and the subject of an intransitive verb ('she ran') take nominative case. The object of a transitive verb takes accusative. Ergative-absolutive alignment instead groups 'undergoer' participants: the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb both take absolutive, while only the agent of a transitive verb takes the special ergative form. Nom-acc groups by subjecthood; erg-abs groups by agentivity and affectedness.

The typological significance is that these two systems represent different cognitive or grammatical stances toward event structure. Nom-acc treats subjecthood as the primary grammatical category; erg-abs treats agentivity in a transitive event as the marked category requiring special morphological recognition. Neither system is more 'logical' than the other — they are alternative solutions to the same problem of encoding participant roles.