Direct and indirect explanations of typopological regularities: The case of alignment variations

Abstract

In the evolution of languages, some changes may lack functional explanations of their own and instead be mechanically triggered by changes occurring in other areas of the grammar. This paper illustrates the necessity to consider indirect explanations of typological regularities on the basis of examples taken from alignment typology, namely: a ) in predominantly ergative languages, intransitive constructions with accusative alignment may develop as a result of the coalescence of light verb compounds; b ) in predominantly ergative languages as well as in predominantly accusative languages, constructions deviating from the dominant alignment type may originate from elliptical variants of transitive constructions; and c ) alignment changes (both from accusative to ergative, and from ergative to accusative) may occur as a consequence of the grammaticalization of TAM periphrases.