Syntactic Alignment & Reference Marking

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Abstractions about how languages mark grammatical relations and rhetorical structure, spanning alignment and case-marking typology (transitive alignment, double-marking language), reference-resolution ambiguity (nearest referent), and phonological or rhetorical patterning (prodelision, chiasmus).

6 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Chiasmus — State two elements in one order and then restate them with their roles swapped (A-B, then B-A) across a pivot, so the crossed inversion silently asserts that the relation runs both ways.
• Double-Marking Language — A double-marking language is one in which the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a phrase tend to be placed on both the heads (or nuclei) of the phrase in question, and on the modifiers or dependents.
• Nearest Referent — The nearest referent is a grammatical term sometimes used when two or more possible referents of a pronoun, or other part of speech, cause ambiguity in a text.
• Prodelision — Prodelision is a form of elision where, in a string of two words, the latter word loses its initial vowel(s).
• Symploce — Symploce repeats one expression at the start and another at the end of successive clauses or lines.
• Transitive alignment — In linguistic typology, transitive alignment is a type of morphosyntactic alignment used in a small number of languages in which a single grammatical case is used to mark both arguments of a transitive verb, but not with the single argument of an intransitive verb.