Summary:

Cross-linguistic research on grammatical relations – such as subjects and objects – and on alignment patterns of individual constructions is challenging, and a number of variables need to be taken into account to make a comparison possible and to account for language internal variation.

This talk gives a systematic overview of the variables in questions, presents a method that allows a comprehensive comparison of alignment patterns across languages and outlines a few areas of application of this method.

In the second part of the talk the question of skewed distribution of individual morphosyntactic alignment types in the languages of the world will be addressed. I will present the results of a study combining  neurophysiological experiments with a typological survey of case marking. This study shows that a particular processing principle is operative species-wide and is independent of the structural proprties of individual languages. This principle causes languages to disfavor a grammar with an ergative marker.