Ergative versus accustive patterns

Ergative versus accusative patterns, in linguistics, are patterns used in different languages for marking the grammatical case of the subject of an intransitive verb, the agent of a transitive verb, and the object of a transitive verb. In ergative languages, such as Basque, the subject and the object have the same form, while the agent has a different form. By contrast, in accusative languages, such as English, the subject and the agent have the same form (e.g., "he"), while the object has a different form (e.g., "him").