Detail #122: Places to put Alignmenty Things

[Some edits have been done due to feedback on the clarity. Great thanks to an American gentleman for helping me out]

Alignment-related stuff is an interesting way of showing off just how non-average non-European your language is. However, it is all too easy to describe a language-encompassing alignment and leave it at that - or maybe specify some rules for when the language aligns with nominative-accusative and when it goes ergative-absolutive.

There are more things to do with alignment than just that though! An obvious bit is in participles and derivative morphology - English famously has 'escapee' following an ergative pattern, but that is not the only possibility. A Siberian language whose name escapes me at the moment has its negative participles follow an ergative pattern, whereas the rest of the language is strictly accusative. 

So, let's get onto some weird places to put some exceptional alignments. Let's assume primarily that we're making an ergative language where accusative alignments keep popping up everywhere. Other combinations of alignments could be made just as well. 

1. Causatives

One could easily have the causer's case marking follow an ergative pattern. In these glosses, C marks the causer, and indices mark the case they mark:

We start with two quite regular sentences:

S_erg O_abs V_trans

 S_abs V_intr

 Adding the causer, C, we obtain, as now the S is notionally an object if no embedded object is present, and using obl as an embedded ergative:

C_erg S_abs V_caus,intr 

C_erg S_obl O_abs V_caus,trans

But much more variety would be achieved with nominative marking in an otherwise ergative language, and this version is what we'll develop further:

C_erg S_abs V_caus,intr 

C_erg S_abs O_obl V_caus,trans

Of course, there's also the possibility of omitting the embedded subject, and just saying that Subject caused Object to be Verbed, in which case we can have anti-ergative patterns, here using the somewhat unclear notion previous encountered in the post on 'intransitive objects' :

C_erg O_abs V_caus,trans 

C_erg S_abs V_caus,trans

or a nominative pattern:

_Cerg O_abs V_caus,trans (causee omitted)
_Cerg S_obl V_caus,trans (object omitted)

Ergative patterns basically do exist for this kind of setup, but they would kind of be odd given that we'd be inserting an ergative pattern into a nominative pattern in an ergative pattern:

_Cerg O_obl V_caus,trans 

C_erg S_obl V_caus,trans

2. Participles

We can have passive participles of transitive verbs marked the same as active participles of intransitive verbs in a nominative language, thus giving us an ergative subsystem. However, we could also have nominative-style participles in an ergative language, thus giving us basically the same kinds of participles that English have. However, we could also have this system break down in some constructions, so that it reverts to the more typical system under certain circumstances - such as, say, with some auxiliary or maybe when the participle is a dangling participle. 

Of course, lexical exceptions also enable funny stuff.

3.  Other non-finite verbal subject and object marking?

4. Some secondary thing, like having possession of subjects marked in one way, and possessions of objects in some other way, in an otherwise very ergative language, or alternatively possession of intransitive subjects and objects marked the same but otherwise a very nominative language.

5. Some other participant marking? (I.e. having the presence of marking for the listener affect cases of the verb arguments? Having marking for the evidentiality-source affect the case marking, in ways that are reminiscent of alignment? This is an idea I came up with a minute before posting this, so will need some further development, and it might turn out that it's ill-conceived from the beginning.)

6. To really make this baroque, one could of course have different noun classes further divide up the case space differently, so that humans follow clearly nominative tendencies both with regular verbs and with causatives (and other similar constructions), whereas other noun classes are nominative, but antiergative in the causatives, some are antiergative, some are ergative with regular verbs but nominative with causatives, etc. Such an alignments galore language would be weird, though, and probably not very realistic. There's probably some hierarchy for what behavior in the regular transitive verb can coexist with what alignment between the arguments of the causative verb, and what kinds of ditransitive alignments are likely to coexist with what kinds of transitive alignments - and even further probably some implicational universals between the causative and ditransitive alignments.