Grammatical Relation

Grammatical relations (GRs) are structurally defined relations between words in phrases and clauses. Common terms used to refer to particular grammatical relations are subject, direct object, indirect object, ergative, absolutive, genitive, and oblique. Sometimes the oblique relation (discussed below) is considered to be the absence of a grammatical relation. Like other structural notions, GRs are defined independently of function (such as semantics or topicality), though they clearly have communicative functions. Even as the structure of any tool is logically distinct from (though intimately connected to) its function, so GRs are logically distinct from the functions that they perform. 

 

Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that GRs play a significant role in expressing meaningful distinctions, such as who is acting upon whom, what is topical, and so on. A second important fact about GRs is that they are essentially relational concepts. In other words, they don’t exist unless there are two elements that are related. A nominal element by itself does not “have” a grammatical relation. It is only when it occurs in a structure with a verb that we can say that it is a “subject” or an “object,” etc. In fact, it may be better to always say “subject of” or “object of” since these terms make it clear that there must be another element in the construction. The grammatical properties that identify GRs are determined by syntactic constructions, and not simply by semantic properties of individual nouns or verbs. Here is an analogy from real life.

 

 A concept like “boy” is not inherently relational, because it depends solely on the characteristics of the individual. The concept of “brother,” on the other hand, is relational, because someone can’t be simply a brother without reference to someone else. Getting back to grammar, a category like plurality is non-relational, because it usually depends on the semantic characteristics of the individual referent of a noun. This semantic characteristic is reflected structurally in many languages by some kind of “plural marking.” Subject, on the other hand, is a category that depends on the structure of the whole clause. 

 

A nominal element can only be the “subject of” some other grammatical element. Sometimes the term argument is used to refer to any nominal that has a grammatical relation to a verb, or to another noun. This sense of the term “argument” is borrowed from mathematics where an argument is an independent variable in a function; in other words, a thing that has a property, or has a relation

to some other thing. A nominal that doesn’t have a grammatical relation to some other word is called either a “non-argument,” or an oblique. GRs can be reflected structurally by any number of features. The three main structural features that often reflect grammatical relations in a clause are the following: r Case marking on nouns r participant reference marking on verbs (agreement, concord) r Constituent order In the following pages, we will see examples of how different languages use these structural features (and a few others) to organize systems of grammatical relations, and will present some methods for analyzing them. 

 

Grammatical relations within noun phrases The simplest illustration of a grammatical relation is the genitive relation that may hold between nouns in a noun phrase. In an English Determined Noun Phrase (DP) like: (1) Caitlin’s quilt the word Caitlin’s refers to a person the speaker is portraying as someone who, in some broad sense, is closely associated with the quilt. Although we intuitively think of genitive arguments (Caitlin in this example) as expressing “possession,” in fact the actual relation between the message-world person referred to by the name Caitlin and the message-world item referred to by the word quilt is in fact quite open ended. The quilt may be the one that Caitlin made, e.g., in the context of a contest in which homemade quilts are being judged, even though she already sold it to someone else. Or it may be the quilt that Caitlin happens to be using right now, though she is not its legal owner. It may be the quilt that Caitlin just bought, or the one she likes best. 

 

There are many examples of genitive-plus-noun constructions in which the genitive noun cannot reasonably be considered the “owner” of the other noun. For example: (2) a. Hiro’s mathematics professor b. Milicent’s favorite political party c. the car’s color d. Madaline’s home town e. the book’s main point Even though the semantic relations between the genitive and the head noun are very different in all of these examples, the morphosyntactic (grammatical) features that express the relation in English are the same. Namely, the “possessor” comes before the head noun and is marked by the suffix spelled ’s. These grammatical features constitute evidence that the two nouns have a grammatical relation to one another. This relation constrains, to a certain extent, the range of semantic relations