The Importance Of Grammatical Relations

1358 Words3 Pages

Grammatical functions serve a purpose of relating predicational units and arguments to one another. They are assumed as part of the syntactic inventory of every language and could also be known as Grammatical Relations. Though some argue that the term grammatical relation is vague, and grammatical functions are a more specific term, which is a link between function and structure (Falk, 2000). Moreover, LFG is a phrased used to refer to the designations of SUBJect, OBJect, OBJθ, COMP, XCOMP, OBLiqueθ, ADJunct, XADJunct which will be discussed here. Syntactic capacities can be cross- grouped in a few distinctive ways. The manageable linguistic capacities SUBJ, OBJ, Objθ, COMP, XCOMP, and Oblθ can be subcategorised, or needed, by a predicate; …show more content…

Launching Floated Quantifiers: In 1993, Kroeger reported that, in Tagalog, the subject launches floating quantifiers, quantifiers that seem outside the phrase they quantify over, which have been shown by Bell in Cebuano (1983) in the given example (3):
(3) Sinusulat lahat ng-mga-bata ang-mga-liham IMPERFECT.write.OBJECTIVE all GEN-PL-child NOM-PL-letter All the letters are written by the/some children. (Intended: All the children are writing letters.)
The Subject Condition, is called the Final I Low in Relational Grammar (Fraantz 1981; Perlmutter and Postal 1983a) and the Extended Projections Principle in Gov- ernment and Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981), was reviewed by Bresnan and Kanerva (1989), who attribute it initially to Baker (1983) (see also Andrews 1985; Levin 1987; Butt et al. 1999):
Subject Condition: Every verbal predicate must have a SUBJ.
In English and many other languages, the Subject Condition looks to hold. On the other hand, there are languages in which the requirement does not hold. As, German impersonal passive, are analyzed as subjectless clauses in (4):
(4) weil getanzt wurde because danced was because there was …show more content…

Relativization: in 1997, Givo n reports that in Kinyarwanda only objects and subjects can be relativized, and only objects can be relativized with a gap; relativisation of subjects needs the use of a probable pronoun.
Additional discussion of object tests that give a detailed discussion was noted by Baker (1983) for Italian and Dahlstrom (1986b) for Cree.
Moreover, numerous languages have more than one expression bearing an object function, English is one of them (7). Also, in 1985, Zaenen and colleagues discuss a lan- guage with multiple object functions, Icelandic, and noticed the existence of irregularities between the two kinds of objects. For example, the primary object can be the antecedent of a reflexive contained in the secondary object as shown in (8).
(7) He gave her a book.
(8) Eg gaf ambattina [konungi s?num.
I gave slave.DEF.ACC king.DAT selfs
I gave the slavei (OBJ) to selfsi king

Open Document