Morphosyntactic Alignment Typology vs. Information-Structural Prominence: Evaluating Nominative-Accusative and Ergative-Absolutive Frameworks in Discourse-Driven Argument Encoding

Abstract

The tension between morphosyntactic alignment typology and information-structural prominence hierarchies represents one of the most contested theoretical fault lines in contemporary grammatical theory. This study presents a cross-linguistic comparison of nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive argument-encoding strategies across six genetically unrelated languages, assessing the predictive adequacy of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) against Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) in capturing discourse-conditioned case alternations. Drawing on annotated corpora of spontaneous spoken discourse and controlled elicitation tasks, our analysis reveals that neither framework fully accounts for split-ergativity phenomena when topic continuity and referential salience interact with aspect-driven transitivity shifts. We conclude that a hybrid constructionist interface, sensitive to both macro-syntactic juncture and pragmatic givenness scales, offers superior empirical coverage. These findings carry significant implications for formal typological modelling and computational parsing of morphologically rich languages.