Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Volume I: Clause Structure, Second edition
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Lgg Typology, Synt Description v. I - Clause structure
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Core grammatical functions In this section we examine core grammatical functions in detail. As discussed at the beginning of section 1, core grammatical functions are those express- ing a, s and p, along with any others that behave like these rather than like The major functions of the noun phrase 165 obliques. Core functions are interesting for several reasons. First, they are used to express a wide range of semantic roles beyond the clearcut cases of agent and patient that provide the basis for defining a and p. Furthermore they tend to be syntactically ‘active’, participating in a wider range of grammatical processes than obliques. Finally, and most interestingly, they are usually (but perhaps not always) associated with what we have called ‘grammatical relations’: struc- tural relationships, which could plausibly be regarded as structural primitives, which play an important role for the functioning of grammatical principles, but are often abstract with respect to coding features or semantic and pragmatic properties, or both. The most commonly found and best evidenced grammatical relation is one expressing a and s functions, commonly known as ‘subject’ (although we shall see that this single label covers at least two rather different kinds of function). But the very prevalence of the subject grammatical relation perhaps leads peo- ple to be insufficiently critical in evaluating the evidence for its presence in particular languages. Therefore in 3.1 we will spend considerable time on the issue of how to argue that a subject grammatical relation is present in a lan- guage. Then in 3.2 we will look at some of the other grammatical relations that can be argued for in languages that have subjects. An important feature of our approach to subjects is that the evidence does not always support their existence in a language; in the remaining subsections we consider various kinds of languages in which subjects as we have defined them don’t exist (although they will show subject-like grammatical relations that we will introduce later). Our conclusion will be that, although a subject grammatical relation does play an important role in the typology of grammatical relations, the subject as tradi- tionally recognized in languages such as English, Latin, and Greek combines two distinct kinds of ‘prominence’ which in many other languages are kept distinct. 3.1 Subjects ‘Subject’ is perhaps the oldest grammatical relation concept, found for exam- ple in the work of Aristotle. 12 There is furthermore a considerable amount of evidence in different languages for some kind of abstract grammatical rela- tion associated with nps traditionally regarded as subjects, much more so than for other grammatical relations. But there has unfortunately been considerable flexibility in the use of the term, with concomitant weakening of content, and controversy as to whether subjects are present in various languages. We will here adopt a rather narrow conception of subject, so that it will be relatively easy to assess whether or not we have evidence for the existence of a subject in 12 See Kneale and Kneale (1962) for discussion of the history of the term and concept. 166 Avery D. Andrews this sense in a particular language (languages without a subject in our present sense might, however, have subjects under some other definition; it’s how the content of the definitions applies to particular languages that is interesting, not the terms that are used as labels). After introducing our concept, we will discuss the various ways in which it can be applied to assess whether or not a subject is present in a language. Download 1.59 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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