In
linguistics,
morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between
arguments—specifically, between the two
arguments (in English, subject and object) of
transitive verbs like
the dog chased the cat, and the single argument of
intransitive verbs like
the cat ran away. English has a
subject, which merges the more active argument of transitive verbs with the argument of intransitive verbs, leaving the
object distinct; other languages may have different strategies, or, rarely, make no distinction at all. Distinctions may be made
morphologically (through
grammatical case or
verbal agreement),
syntactically (through
word order), or both.