Grammatical Relations Typology
Draft of a chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Language Typology, ed. Jae Jung Song. Grammatical Relations Typology Balthasar Bickel University of Leipzig 1. Grammatical relations past and present Traditionally, the term ‘grammatical relation’ (GR) refers to the morphosyntactic pro- perties that relate an argument to a clause, as, for example, its subject or its object. Alternative terms are ‘syntactic function’ or ‘syntactic role’, and they highlight the fact that GRs are defined by the way in which arguments are integrated syntactically into a clause, i.e. by functioning as subject, object etc. Whatever terminology one prefers, what is crucial about the traditional notion of GRs is (a) that they are identi- fied by syntactic properties, and (b) that they relate an argument to the clause. This differentiates GRs from semantic roles (SRs), also known as thematic roles (θ-roles): SRs are semantic, not syntactic relations, and they hold between arguments and predicates (typically verbs), rather than between arguments and clauses. The difference between GRs and SRs is best visible in such contrasts as Sue killed the shark vs. Sue was killed by the shark: in both cases, the NP Sue is the subject of the clause. But in the active version, the referent of Sue is the agent of ‘kill’, while in the passive version, Sue is the patient of ‘kill.’ The syntactic properties that have traditionally been considered the key identifiers of GRs are the property of triggering verb agreement and the property of beeing assigned a specific case. In our example, Sue triggers third person singular agreement in the verb and this identifies the NP as the subject of the clause.
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