Alignment patterns in Asia and Africa: A geolinguistic approach to linguistic patterns

This study draws linguistic maps of the alignment patterns in Asian and African languages to analyze the distributions of these patterns and examine their historical development, contrasting intransitive and highly transitive constructions with arguments in equal animacy. The maps that are provided here include an overall map, enlarged-view maps, and maps by type as excerpted from the overall map. The overall map imports the maps provided by the contributors to our previous project. The maps by type clarify the geographical distribution of the alignment patterns. These maps provide examples of the diffusion of linguistic patterns; the alignment patterns may show areal tendencies beyond the differences among genetic groups. Considerably, the ergative-absolutive, tripartite, and transitive patterns show distributions that suggest their histories: the ergative-absolutive type exhibits a continuous distribution in Asia, whereas the tripartite and transitive types are distributed across small but overlapping regions relative to the ergative-absolutive. These distributions suggest the diffusion of the ergative-absolutive type and the later development of tripartite and transitive types. The nominative-accusative patterns without verbal person marking also show an areal tendency in East and Southeast Asia.