Home › Languages › English
English
Glottocode: stan1293
Genalogical classification: Indo-European
Original alignment pattern: Nominative
Source construction: In Old English, some noun classes still retained a distinction between nominative case for A and S and accusative case for P in the singular, as in (1).
Developmental mechanism: Two phonological changes took place: (i) unstressed vowels were reduced to schwa, (ii) word final -n got lost. These changes eliminated the distinction between A and S forms on the one hand and P forms on the other.
Resulting construction: Case marking on nouns was lost, bringing about a new neuter alignment pattern for case marking.
Type of change: Phonological change
Alignment in the resulting construction: Neuter
Global alignment pattern following the change: NP-based split accusativity
Constraints on the distribution of the resulting alignment: The new alignement pattern is restricted to nouns, whereas non-neuter pronouns still retain a nominative-accusative alignment pattern (e.g. he/him, she/her).
Grammatical domains: Case marking
Symmetry: Symmetric
Type of data: Historical data
References: Blake 2001:176-178
Examples
(1) English (Indo-European; Blake 2001:177)
| Noun | A, S | P | Noun | A, S | P | |
| 'tale' | talu | tale | 'name' | nama | naman |