Grammatical Relations

This paper analyses adverbial clauses in Veracruz Huasteca Nahuatl (vhn), a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Mexico. We argue that the formal properties of adverbial clauses in vhn are motivated by general functional principles, particularly, their semantic values. We address seven semantic relations: temporal precedence, temporal subsequence, temporal simultaneity, cause/reason, purpose, result, and spatial relations. We support the analysis not only with evidence from vhn, but also from other languages of the world where two morphosyntactic devices are important: adverbial conjunctions and tam morphology.  Our main claim is that the different semantic relations encoded within adverbial clauses take on specific formal mechanisms to express those particular communicative situations.

This chapter discusses one of the major advances of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) relative to other theories of grammar: the view of grammatical relations as construction-based, and so not only language-specific but construction-specific, rather than being global categories of the whole language and being found in every language. We also discuss the RRG conception of the function of grammatical relations in referent tracking, which was one of the major insights that led to the development (and naming) of RRG. These two insights have influenced the development of ideas outside RRG.

Our study analyses the manner of conceptualising and of describing the secondary object (SO) in the latest edition of Romanian Grammar (GALR 2005, 2008). To that effect, the five criteria pre- sented by the academic treatise for the purpose of differentiating the SO from the direct object (DO) are considered both from the perspective of their consistency and from the perspective of the current tendencies in the dynamics of the Romanian language. With respect to consistency, the last three of the five criteria advanced by the GALR – the impossibility of coordination between the SO and the DO, the existence of a different grid of thematic roles and the incompatibility between the SO and the indirect object (IO) – are discarded as non-conclusive in the process of carrying out an efficient separation between the SO and the DO. Furthermore, we note the fact that, from the list of the 12 ditransitive verbs provided by the GALR (a anunţa „to announce”, a asculta „to listen”, a convinge „to convince”, a dăscăli „to teach”, a examina „to examine”, a informa „to inform”, a învăţa „to learn”, a ruga „to ask”, a sfătui „to advise”, a vesti „to state”, a traversa „to traverse”, a trece „to pass”), some have lost this trait in the current stage of evolution of the Romanian language. On the other hand, when the SO indicates an object co-referential to a 3rd person singular feminine clitic, in the common use of the Romanian language one can observe the tendency of constructing the SO with pe and, therefore, of substituting/ doubling it by the corresponding clitic (o), which results in these properties no longer functioning as distinctive traits of the DO in relation to the SO. In conclusion, none of the five criteria suggested by the GALR works as a diagnostic test in order to dissociate between the two functions (DO and SO). However, we think that this fact should not lead to the elimination of the SO function from the Romanian grammar, but merely to a more rigorous formalisation of the thematic roles characteristic to the SO and the DO. In our opinion, only such an operation shall be able to support a criterion which should be sufficiently solid to differentiate between the two syntactic functions.

This paper describes a number of selectors for grammatical relations in Yaqui. The main selectors discussed in the paper include case marking, word order, suppletion, passive and valency-increasing mechanisms, control and ana-phoric constructions. The study reveals two crucial aspects: Yaqui is a good example of a language where grammatical relations can be characterized as a construction-specific category, and the distinction between core and non-core arguments is essential to determine the selected argument in particular constructions.

According to the communis opinio, there is no place for the grammatical category of subject in Pāṇini's grammar of Sanskrit. This is due to the fact that, according to many scholars of Pāṇini, Sanskrit lacks this category in its grammar. However, if we take into consideration a wider view of what Pāṇini's grammar is and what language it presupposes, we can conclude that speaking of subject becomes more sensible, especially if we take into account some features of subjecthood that so far have not been used in this respect. I conclude that, if not Pāṇini himself, some later commentators could have had a notion very similar to subject in their linguistic background, which induced them to interpret Pāṇini's theories so that the idea of subjecthood eventually surfaced.

This paper argues that long-standing problems in the analysis of Chinese, such as the question of word classes and grammatical relations, can be resolved, or actually done away with completely, if we take a constructionist approach in the analysis. This means the constructions are taken as basic, so we only need to look at the propositional functions of elements in the construction (referential, modifying, or predicative), and do not need to posit global categories such as word classes and grammatical relations.

This paper analyses voice and grammatical relations in Lamaholot (eastern Indonesia) in light of the typologies of voice systems in western Austronesian languages. In the literature, languages of eastern Indonesia are assumed either not to display any grammaticized voice contrasts, or to show asymmetrical voice alternations if they do. However, this literature does not take Lamaholot into account. On the one hand, this language does display various conceptual voice contrasts, such as antipassive, anticausative, and middle, by means of the transitivity alternation, addition of prepositional elements, and other periphrastic strategies. On the other hand, there are also construction types differentiated by word order for different pragmatic requirements: the Subject-Topic and the Object-Topic constructions, the ditransitive alternation, and the benefactive alternation are all used to express the same conceptual content with different arguments highlighted for pragmatic purposes. These alternations essentially perform the same syntactic/pragmatic function as the focus system in Philippine languages. Therefore, the data and analyses presented here as well as the diversity shown in the growing literature on eastern Indonesian languages call for a more comprehensive and systematic typology of western Austronesian voice systems. At the very least, it is too early to conclude that eastern Indonesian languages lack voice alternations.

This article discusses three variable coding properties of Spanish objects: a-marking, clitic doubling, and case form (accusative lo vs. dative le). These properties are essential for the formal identification of grammatical relations. They are triggered by similar parameters that partly overlap and partly show different distributions, yet they also challenge the boundaries between direct objects [DO] and indirect objects [IO] and the typological alignment of Spanish (di)transitive clauses, either indirective or secundative. The study draws on quantitative and qualitative corpus data on formal, semantic and discourse properties of core participants in Spanish clauses, relating these properties to the distribution of variable coding, and concludes that a-marking, clitic doubling, and leísmo are less frequently employed than unmarked objects, no doubling, and accusative case for clitics, that Spanish DO and IO must be taken as extreme points of a more general Object syntactic function, and that, in general, all variable object coding follows an indirective alignment type. Consequently, animate and topical objects are considered as formally and functionally marked atypical objects both in monotransitive and ditransitive clauses.

Syntactic reconstruction has virtually been outlawed in historical-comparative research for a long time, more or less ever since Watkins’ (1964, 1976) influential work on the problems of reconstructing word order for Proto-Indo-European. Recently, through the emergence of Construction Grammar, where complex syntactic structures are regarded as form–function pairings, a resurgence of syntactic reconstruction is made possible, as complex syntactic structures become a legitimate object of the Comparative Method. Given the legitimacy of syntactic reconstruction, and hence the possible reconstruction of argument structure constructions (Barðdal & Eythórsson 2011, Eythórsson & Barðdal 2011, Barðdal 2012), a major question arises as to whether also grammatical relations are reconstructable for earlier undocumented language periods. We argue that if the constructions singling out grammatical relations can be reconstructed for a proto-branch, the grammatical relations following from these are also reconstructable for that proto-branch. In order to illustrate our methodology, we show how a reconstruction of the subject function in Proto-Germanic may be carried out, more specifically of oblique subjects predicates like ‘hunger’, ‘thirst’ and ‘lust’ and others, based on the subject properties found in the earliest Germanic daughter languages.

Comprehenders need to incrementally integrate incoming input with previously processed material. Constraint-based and probabilistic theories of language understanding hold that comprehenders do this by drawing on implicit knowledge about the statistics of the language signal, as observed in their previous experience. I test this prediction against the processing of grammatical relations in Swedish transitive sentences, combining corpus-based modeling and a self-paced reading experiment.

Grammatical relations are often assumed to express role-semantic (e.g., Actor and Undergoer) and discourse-related (such as topic and focus) functions that are encoded on the basis of a systematic interplay between morphosyntactic (e.g., case and word order), semantic / referential (e.g., animacy and definiteness) and verb semantic (e.g., volitionality and sentience) information. Constraint-based and probabilistic theories predict that these information types serve as cues in the process of assigning functions to the argument NPs during language comprehension. The weighting, interplay and availability of these cues vary across languages but do so in systematic ways. For example, languages with fixed word orders tend to have less morphological marking of grammatical relations than languages with less rigid word order restrictions. The morphological marking of grammatical relations is also in many languages restricted to NP arguments which are non-prototypical or marked in terms of semantic or referential properties, given their functions (overt case marking of objects is, e.g., restricted to personal pronouns in English and Swedish). I first assess how these factors affect constituent order (i.e. the order of grammatical relations) in a corpus of Swedish and then test whether comprehenders use the statistical information contained in these cues.

Corpus study. The distribution of SVO and OVS orders conditional on semantic / referential (e.g., animacy and givenness), morphosyntactic (e.g., case) and verb semantic (e.g. volitionality) information was calculated on the basis of 16552 transitive sentences, extracted from a syntactically annotated corpus of Swedish. Three separate mixed logistic regression models were fit to derive the incremental predictions that a simulated comprehender with experience in Swedish would have after seeing the sentence up to and including the first NP (model 1), the verb (model 2), or the second NP (model 3). The regression models provide separate estimates of the objective probability of SVO vs. OVS word order at each point in the sentence. This information was used to design stimuli for a self-paced reading experiment to test whether comprehenders draw on this objectively present information in the input.

Self-paced reading experiment. 45 participants read transitive sentences that varied with respect to word order (SVO vs. OVS), NP1 animacy (animate vs. inanimate) and verb class (volitional vs. experiencer).  By-region reading times were well-described by the region-by-region shifts in the probability of SVO vs. OVS word order, calculated as the relative entropy. For example, reading times in the NP2 region observed in locally ambiguous, object-initial sentences were mitigated when the animacy of NP1 and its interaction with the verb class bias towards an object-initial word order, as predicted by the constraint-based and probabilistic theories.

Do principles of language processing in the brain affect the way grammar evolves over time or is language change just a matter of socio-historical contingency? While the balance of evidence has been ambiguous and controversial, we identify here a neurophysiological constraint on the processing of language that has a systematic effect on the evolution of how noun phrases are marked by case (i.e. by such contrasts as between the English base form she and the object form her). In neurophysiological experiments across diverse languages we found that during processing, participants initially interpret the first base-form noun phrase they hear (e.g. she…) as an agent (which would fit a continuation like … greeted him), even when the sentence later requires the interpretation of a patient role (as in … was greeted). We show that this processing principle is also operative in Hindi, a language where initial base-form noun phrases most commonly denote patients because many agents receive a s...

This paper describes the alignment system for verbal person-marking in Chitimacha, a language isolate of Louisiana. Using data from recently digitized versions of texts collected by Morris Swadesh in the 1930s, I show that Chitimacha exhibits a split alignment system with agent-patient alignment in the first person and nominative-accusative alignment in non-first persons. The agent-patient alternation is shown to cross-cut subjects of intransitives, objects and even subjects of transitives, and direct/indirect objects of di-transitives. The agent-patient system in Chitimacha is therefore sensitive not to transitivity but rather to the semantic categories of agent and patient, making it an exemplary case of semantic alignment. I also discuss evidence of the diachronic origins of the agent-patient pattern and show that it arose via a reanalysis of transitive verbs with impersonal subjects ("transimpersonals") as intransitive verbs with patientive subjects.

This article re-examines the issue of grammatical relations in Mandarin Chinese in light of the results of recent large-scale typological research on grammatical relations (henceforth GRs) worldwide. Specifically, it discusses three syntactic operations and constructions that are cross-linguistically relevant to the definition of grammatical relations, namely relativisation, reflexivisation, and quantifier float. The study adopts a strictly language-internal typological approach and avails itself of natural linguistic data or sentences sanity-checked by native speakers. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, it explores the hypothesis that, in line with various other languages, GRs in Mandarin Chinese are construction-specific. Second, it proposes an alternative approach capable of explaining the conflicting evidence often pointed out in the literature on GRs and subjecthood in Mandarin Chinese.

In the article, the types of causative constructions in Georgian are discussed with respect to semantic roles, syntactic functions, and morphological marking. The three types of causaitve: lexical, analytic, and morphological are mentioned, but within the scope of the article, all the analyses are focused on and the restrictive rules are established according to the latter. The Georgian Causative are checked according to the hierarchy of grammatical relations by Comrie and the generalisation of case marking by Baker. Theoretically possible and actually attested combinations of basic and syntactically derived constructions are calculated with respect to valency and transitivity. At the end of the paper the restrictive rules (according to Baker) and relationship with the Comrian ideas are established. The schemes are shown according to the relationship and correpsondences of semantic roles and syntactic functions (taking into account both basic and derived constructions). The results are useful for the linguistic typology.

This article examines the methodological possibilities of approaching linguistic change with reference to two individual case studies in Finnish. The first case study concerns the development of the numeral yksi (‘one’) to its use as an indefinite article, and the second concentrates on the development of the spatial postposition perään (‘behind/after’) into a marker of grammatical relations. Until now, it has been claimed that both phenomena are induced by language contact. Both case studies exploit data from various stages of written and spoken Finnish, and they show that by combining the perspectives of grammaticalisation, contact-induced change and cross-linguistic comparison, it is possible to open up new insights into the research of language change.

From the point of view of grammaticalisation, the development of a numeral into an indefinite pronoun and article, or of a spatial adposition into a marker of grammatical relations, is an ordinary and cognitively natural linguistic change. Even in the case of Finnish, there is no reason to contend the possibility that these developments may indeed have taken place without the influence of other languages. However, changes within any given language are often linked to a variety of external factors. In addition to typologically oriented research on grammaticalisation, this fact has been extensively documented in the field of contact linguistics, where the strict division between internal and external causes has been questioned. Many researchers in fact stress the possibility of multiple causation in linguistic change, a fact that becomes clear from the case studies examined in this article as well: in the case both of the article yksi (‘one’) and of the postposition perään (‘behind/after’) contact with other languages may well have accelerated changes already occurring within the language. Cross-linguistic comparison, in turn – whether typological or a comparison between two or more languages – makes it possible to predict the direction of change: it is not unusual that the same phenomenon represents different stages of development in different languages, and by comparing languages with one another we can foresee the probable direction the language at an earlier stage of development will take.

The cases of yksi (‘one’) and perään (‘behind/after’) demonstrate that it is not necessarily possible to separate external and internal causes of linguistic change in the history of written Finnish. The domestic and the foreign may have intertwined, and discerning them from one another is often not a question of linguistic structure but one of language ideology.

Tama kirjoitus pohtii kielellisen muutoksen tutkimusmenetelmia kahden tapaustutkimuksen avulla. Tarkasteltavina ilmioina on numeraalin yksi kehittyminen artikkeliksi ja spatiaalisen postposition peraan muuttuminen rektiosuhteen ilmaisimeksi. Molempia ilmiota on tahan saakka pidetty kielikontaktin virittamina muutoksina. Eri-ikaisiin kirja- ja puhekielen aineistoihin perustuvat tapaustutkimukset osoittavat, kuinka kieliopillistumisen, kielikontaktien ja kieltenvalisen vertailun nakokulmia yhdistelemalla on mahdollista avata uusia ikkunoita kielenmuutoksen tutkimukseen. Kieliopillistumistutkimuksen nakokulmasta numeraalin kehittyminen indefiniittipronominiksi ja artikkeliksi seka spatiaalisen adposition kehittyminen rektioadpositioksi ovat kielissa tavallisia ja kognitiivisesti luontevia muutoksia. Suomessakaan ei ole siten syyta sulkea pois mahdollisuutta, etta yksi olisi voinut lahtea kehittymaan artikkeliksi ja peraan rektion merkitsijaksi itsenaisesti ilman muiden kielten vaikutus...

This talk describes a discourse-optional subject (nominative) marker in Chitimacha, a language isolate of Louisiana. This marker is especially interesting because its form is quite polysemous, so that the nominative function is just one among many functions within a larger polygrammaticalization chain. This marker is also interesting because it competes in some contexts with an ergative marker, suggesting a system in shift due to contact with neighboring languages.

Une analyse syntaxique unitaire des constructions avec AVO en védique, grec ancien et latin fait l’objet de cet article. On les compare avec les constructions verbales correspondantes, actives et passives, pour déterminer les valeurs fonctionnelles qui y jouent un rôle. Une différence pertinente entre les deux types de constructions se fait jour. Une prédication projetée comme AVO entrave régulièrement la carrière du Sujet initial vers la fonction de Sujet final. La discontinuité entre les deux fonctions ne caractérise pas en revanche les constructions verbales, où le sort du Sujet initial relève de la diathèse. Ressemblances et dissemblances entre les deux types de construction, y compris le dit « datif d’agent », ne sont que des reflets de cette différence de base.

The Principle of the Uniqueness of Grammatical Relations, which requires that all grammatical relations be distinguishable on morphological and/or syntactic grounds and non-repeatable in a clause, is often assumed to be a universal requirement of language and is a central tenet, explicit or implicit, of many theories of grammar. Upper Necaxa Totonac offers an apparent exception to this principle in that it has clauses with multiple objects that seem grammatically identical, yet do not appear to be adjuncts as they control agreement and are active in processes such as reciprocalization. Extensive testing of the properties of Upper Necaxa objects shows that, while a primary object can be distinguished on the basis of a single diagnostic, any remaining objects are indistinguishable and so must be treated as being governed by the same grammatical relation which is, therefore, non-unique. This data requires a reconsideration of the Uniqueness Principle as an absolute universal, and as an axiom or a necessary tenet of theories of human language.

This paper seeks to determine the system of grammatical relations for verbal person marking in Chitimacha, a once-extinct isolate from Louisiana now undergoing revitalization efforts. Though the language was documented intermittently from 1802 onwards, the most extensive and reliable documentation is from Morris Swadesh's work with the last two native speakers in the 1930s. These efforts resulted in a grammar, 3,500-word dictionary, and collection of 110 texts, all unpublished and as yet untranscribed. This study examines a selection of of those texts to determine whether Chitimacha person marking follows an agent-patient system, an active-stative system, or something else entirely.

We argue that subject-like obliques of the impersonal construction show behavioral properties of syntactic subjects in Old Germanic, contrary to standard assumptions (Cole et al. 1980). Subject tests, including control infinitives, reveal that subject-like obliques in Old and Early Middle English, Old Swedish, and Old Norse-Icelandic exhibit behavioral properties of subjects, as they do in Modern Icelandic and Faroese. We also present new data from Modern German, illustrating the same syntactic behavior of corresponding arguments in that language. Thus, we conclude that subject-like obliques exhibit behavioral properties of syntactic subjects from the earliest attested Germanic period onwards. Our findings contradict the standard view that these arguments were objects, which gradually acquired subject properties. We show that data from Gothic intended to support the standard view has been misinterpreted. Given the validity of our findings there are no grounds for reconstructing a stage at which subject-like obliques were objects in Germanic.

Une analyse syntaxique unitaire des constructions avec AVO en védique, grec ancien et latin fait l’objet de cet article. On les compare avec les constructions verbales correspondantes, actives et passives, pour déterminer les valeurs fonctionnelles qui y jouent un rôle. Une différence pertinente entre les deux types de constructions se fait jour. Une prédication projetée comme AVO entrave régulièrement la carrière du Sujet initial vers la fonction de Sujet final. La discontinuité entre les deux fonctions ne caractérise pas en revanche les constructions verbales, où le sort du Sujet initial relève de la diathèse. Ressemblances et dissemblances entre les deux types de construction, y compris le dit « datif d’agent », ne sont que des reflets de cette différence de base.

In the article, the types of causative constructions in Georgian are discussed with respect to semantic roles, syntactic functions, and morphological marking. The three types of causaitve: lexical, analytic, and morphological are mentioned, but within the scope of the article, all the analyses are focused on and the restrictive rules are established according to the latter. The Georgian Causative are checked according to the hierarchy of grammatical relations by Comrie and the generalisation of case marking by Baker. Theoretically possible and actually attested combinations of basic and syntactically derived constructions are calculated with respect to valency and transitivity. At the end of the paper the restrictive rules (according to Baker) and relationship with the Comrian ideas are established. The schemes are shown according to the relationship and correpsondences of semantic roles and syntactic functions (taking into account both basic and derived constructions). The results ...

This paper is an investigation of grammatical relations' marking that combines the advances of monolingual analysis with cross-linguistic comparison. It examines adpositions as grammatical relations' markers and the linguistic change which leads to the rise of adpositional objects from freely insertable spatial adverbi-als. is study concentrates on the Finnish adposition perään 'a er'. An empirical monolingual corpus analysis shows that perään as a grammatical relations' marker is a productive device for argument linking in contemporary Finnish. In a cross-linguistic comparison, the properties of Swedish, German and Finnish adpositional objects with e er, nach and perään 'a er' , are studied with regard to the continuum between prototypical freely insertable adverbials and pro-totypical adpositional objects. A diachronic comparison, in turn, focuses on the development of adpositional objects from spatial adverbials and examines three alternative possibilities for perään: native grammaticalization, contact-induced grammaticalization and the interaction of both language-internal and-external factors.