Ergative/Absolutive and Active/Stative alignment in West Africa: The case of Southwestern Mande Valentin Vydrin To cite this version: Valentin Vydrin. Ergative/Absolutive and Active/Stative alignment in West Africa: The case of Southwestern Mande. Studies in Language, John Benjamins Publishing, 2011, 35 (2), pp.409-443. halshs-00717962 HAL Id: halshs-00717962 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00717962 Submitted on 14 Jul 2012 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Ergative/Absolutive and Active/Stative alignment in West Africa: The case of Southwestern Mande Valentin Vydrin INALCO/CNRS-LLACAN, Paris Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Russian Academy of Sciences), St. Petersburg
[email protected] Valentin Vydrin Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography 3, University Embankment St. Petersburg 199 034 Russia 1 Abstract It is usually believed that non-accusative alignment systems are very rare in Africa. A thorough study of the verbal systems of the Southwestern Mande languages (Looma, Mende, Kpelle) has shown that this group is an exception. The Ergative/Absolutive types of argument coding and semantic alignment are observed in these languages mainly in the personal marking on the verbs.