ergativity.

A grammatical alignment treating an intransitive subject like a transitive object rather than a transitive subject.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• morphological ergativity
• syntactic ergativity
• split ergativity

On the page

The grammar described ergativity through its contrasting treatment of transitive and intransitive subjects.

Usage notes

Primary category: academic / formal / analytical. Lexical Type: Word. Forms: Usually uncountable; no ordinary plural in this sense. Commonness: uncommon (editorial estimate; not a corpus frequency statistic). Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1; numbered fields keep each relevant meaning separate. Research distinction: Cambridge directly verifies intransitive-subject/transitive-object alignment; grammatical notes avoid a simplistic English-word-order interpretation. Writing functions: language analysis, conceptual distinction.