A Typological Approach to Mixed Case-alignment Patterns in Chinese

It is common for a certain language to have both nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive patterns in the world, which is conditioned by the factors of tense-aspect-modality, semantic nature of predicative verb and semantic nature of core NP, etc. In the coexistence of the nominative-accusative pattern and the ergative-absolutive pattern in many languages, a differentiation between absolutive case and nominative case often occurs in the case function of the same morphological morpheme or a zero morpheme. From a cross-linguistic view, this article attempts to show that Chinese has the coexistence of nominative-accusative pattern and ergative-absolutive pattern conditioned by different types of verbs or verbal complexes (VC) and resultative aspect. It is proposed that in Chinese the unmarked basic word order or syntactic positions can serve as case markers to exhibit a certain case-alignment pattern. The ergative-absolutive Ba-construction and the absolutive construction fall into the ergative-absolutive pattern, which is different from the case-alignment pattern of the nominative-accusative construction and the nominative construction. In terms of the differentiation of the functions of case markers, it is observed that differentiations occur between ergative-absolutive case in the Ba-construction and nominative-accusative case in the nominative-accusative construction, between absolutive case inS _ABSV/VC and nominative case inS _NOMV/VC, and between absolutive case inV/VC S _ABSand accusative case inV/VC P _ACC.