Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Volume I: Clause Structure, Second edition
Overview of grammatical functions
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Lgg Typology, Synt Description v. I - Clause structure
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Overview of grammatical functions With these preliminaries completed, we will proceed to look at the grammat- ical functions themselves. We will first present a general classification of the types of grammatical function, then examine specific types in greater detail. Figure 3.2 is a diagram of the taxonomy of grammatical functions that we will be looking at. 9 grammatical functions internal core A S O oblique free bound external Figure 3.2 Taxonomy of grammatical functions 2.1 Types of grammatical function We will distinguish three fundamental types of grammatical function, core, oblique and external, which may be thought of as constituting successive layers of clause structure. The first division is between the external functions and the others, which we will call internal. External functions give the appearance of being essentially outside of the basic clause structure, and are each associated with a fairly specific pragmatic function. The it-cleft construction of (2) and the as for construction above illustrate typical external functions. An external function never itself has an association with any specific semantic role, although the nps bearing them often (but not always) acquire a semantic role by other means. The internal functions have close associations with semantic roles, though they may be associated with pragmatic functions as well. Subject, object and the various prepositional phrases in (7) and (8) bear typical internal functions. Note that by saying that internal functions are associated with semantic roles we do not mean that they have them as invariant properties, but merely that they tend to go together. Subject in English is associated with the semantic role of agent, but many subjects are not agents; the preposition to is often associated with the semantic role recipient, but not always. Among internal functions, a, s, and p have a special status, because they almost always have a variety of properties which set them off from most of 9 I’m indebted to Stuart Robinson for suggesting and providing this diagram. The major functions of the noun phrase 153 the other grammatical functions. In English for example, with the exception of personal pronouns, a, s, and p are unmarked nps, with functions coded by order relative to the verb, while most other functions are coded by prepositional np -marking. In English, not only do nps with a, s and p functions differ in appearance from prepositionally marked nps, they also differ in various aspects of their syntactic and semantic behaviour. Two especially important properties are that they tend to express a wider range of semantic roles, and that they tend to be ‘targetted’, that is, singled out for special treatment, by various rules of syntax which appear to function in terms of specific grammatical relations, rather than in terms of semantic roles or pragmatic functions. For example, subjects are omitted in various kinds of nonfinite subordinate clause constructions, such as the infinitive complement of want in (25a), and the participial adjunct in (25b): (25) a. John wants to buy a new computer b. Having bought a new computer, John couldn’t afford lunch for three months On the other hand objects may be passivized: (26) a. John was arrested b. John was given a book Rules involving prepositional phrases (hereafter in this chapter abbreviated to ‘pp’), on the other hand, tend to apply to a wide range of constituents, including non-pps, with restrictions being statable in terms of semantically specifiable categories rather than syntactic ones. In most other languages there is a similar distinction between a small class of grammatical relations expressing a, s and p (and sometimes other) functions, which behave somewhat like subject and object in English, and a larger class, which behave like English pps. We thus divide the internal function into two categories, calling the former class of grammatical functions ‘core’, the latter, ‘oblique’. Thus the core functions are by definition a, s, p, and whatever other grammatical functions are sufficiently like them to be plausibly grouped with them and opposed to the others, which are the oblique functions. Languages in which the core/oblique distinction corresponds to that between bare nps and those carrying a marker are not uncommon. Some additional examples are Jacaltec and other Mayan languages (Craig (1977); England (1983a)), Bahasa Indonesia (Chung (1976)), Dakota (Van Valin (1985)), and the Bantu languages, some of which will be discussed below. In other languages, there does not seem to be a significant syntactic distinction between marked and unmarked nps. In Japanese (Kuno (1973)), Russian (Comrie (1979)), and Tagalog (Schachter and Otanes (1972)), for example, all nps are marked. In other languages, such as Warlpiri, some nps are unmarked, but the marked nps |
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