Alignment everywhere all at once: Applying the late aggregation principle to a typological database of argument marking

This article presents the structure of the ATLAs Alignment Module, a typological database designed to exhaustively capture language-internal variation in argument marking (indexing and flagging). The flexible design of our database can be extended to cover further aspects of morphosyntactic alignment. We demonstrate with a small diversity sample how the database can be queried and the data aggregated at different levels of structure (e.g. for a language as a whole or for individual referential types in the form of alignment statements) for the purposes of cross-linguistic comparison. The database is made available in the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats (CLDF), and we provide code that generates an array of aggregations.