A guideline to analyse alignment

Author : Kees Hengeveld

Publication date : 2008

Goals

This questionnaire, intended for linguists, can be used for any investigated language. It aims to help in analysing alignment in one, two and three-places predicates, as well as in studying valency operations (both increasing and descreasing).

Protocol summary

The questionnaire is divided in three parts :

- The basic alignment: in this section, the linguist is asked to list the different alignments (one, two and three-places predicates) they can notice in the studied language, without considering valency operations yet. It is about setting up the basis of the study.
- The basic alignment system: this part aims to figure out if there is any split in the alignment marking according to different type of verbs (e.g: does the semantic of a verb influence the marking of its arguments?) .  
- Alignment changing operations: it focuses on (impersonal) passive, antipassive, dative shift and applicative operations.

Development context

''This questionnaire was developed for a research seminar on alignment taught at the University of Amsterdam.'' (the Typological tools for field linguistics website, https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/tools-at-lingboard/questionnaire/ditransitive-alignment_description.php)