CHAPTER SIX

GRAMMATICAL FUNCTIONS OF NOUN PHRASE

Following Andrews (1985: 65-66), the term ‘grammatical function’ is intended to differentiate from ‘grammatical relation’. The former, having a broader sense, covers whatever identifiable functions that a noun phrase may bear, whereas the latter is confined to functions that are significant for the operation of grammatical rules in a language. Grammatical relations such as ‘subject’ do not play a pivotal role in the grammar of Prinmi. This is a major departure of Prinmi from many better-known languages. It is, therefore, useful to discuss grammatical function of noun phrase in this chapter before analyzing its structure in Chapter 7.1 This chapter starts with a discussion of semantic roles. Core and oblique functions are then addressed. In §6.3 the grammatical system of Prinmi is investigated to explore grammatical relations, if any, which are significant in the language. The final section studies prag- matic functions of noun phrase in Prinmi.

6.1. Semantic roles

It is generally accepted that some semantic roles are found in the grammar of every language (cf. Foley 1993: 136; Palmer 1994: 22- 25). The major semantic roles crucial to the Prinmi grammar are tabulated in Table 6-1, where morphosyntactic marking of the seman- tic roles is also indicated. Terms of semantic roles is capitalized. The two most important semantic functions are Agent and Patient, which are abbreviated as A and P respectively (details in §6.2.1). Theme characterizes an argument to be ‘a participant as being in a state/position, or changing its state/position’ (Andrews 1985: 70). Prinmi distinguishes Beneficiary from Recipient, with the former, receiving only benefits, being a special type of Recipient (as pointed out in §4.3.9.2). Other semantic roles listed in the table are self- explanatory.

1 Although the structure of a Prinmi noun phrase may be complex, noun phrases used in this chapter are generally rather simple. GRAMMATICAL FUNCTIONS OF NOUN PHRASES 139

Table 6-1: Major semantic roles and their morphosyntactic markings

Semantic roles Morphosyntactic marking 1. Agent unmarked or by õ 2. Patient no marking 3. Theme no marking 4. Experiencer no marking 5. Recipient/Goal mostly by be 6. Donor/Source mostly by be 7. Beneficiary by ki 8. Benefactive by bo 9. Locative unmarked or by be and others 10. Temporal unmarked or by be 11. Comitative by ni 12. Instrumental by õ

The morphosyntactic marking, where applicable, for semantic roles is usually carried out by clitic-like postpositions (see §4.3.9). At least one of them, the Instrumental õ, is fully cliticized; it often appears in a complex form with the topic clitic ɡe, i.e. ɡõ. Prinmi noun phrases, irrespective of morphosyntactic marking, often co-occur with dis- course clitics (see §6.4 and §7.2.2). Agent and Recipient/Goal are typically marked overtly in Prinmi. The Agent marker õ (or ɡõ) is also employed for marking Instrumen- tal, and the Recipient/Goal marker be bears additional functions for signifying Donor/Source, Locative, or Temporal. The multi-functions of the Instrumental and Recipient/Goal markers are not regarded as homophony, as these are observed cross-linguistically and their semantic extensions can be accounted for with an underlying generali- zation (cf. Blake 1977; Anderson 1985b).

6.1.1. Agent-marking and Instrumental-marking Owing to availability of zero anaphora in Prinmi, the main consultant can easily avoid using õ/ɡõ to mark Agent and Instrumental in a single clause. No instance of dual functions of the marker is found in the corpus collected on my first field trip. In a sentence that describes someone doing something with an instrument, the Agent is typically introduced in a clause, and then referred to by a zero anaphor in another clause where the Instrumental occurs. For example: