Grammatical relations in Mandinka

In this paper, after establishing on a strictly language-internal basis the distinction between four possible syntactic positions for arguments in Mandinka predicative constructions, and analyzing alignment relationships in the coding properties of arguments, I discuss alignment in the syntactic operations and constructions likely to be relevant to the definition of grammatical relations. Most of them confirm the S = A ≠ P alignment apparent in the coding properties of arguments. However, Mandinka also has several constructions or operations with no differentiation between S, A and P, a few others in which A and P behave differently and S is aligned with P, and one with a tripartite treatment of S, A and P.