Grammatical Relations

Abstract

By grammatical relations (such as subject, direct object, indirect object) we understand structurally encoded standard syntactic relations between the constituents of a clause, in particular between the predicate and noun phrases. Grammatical relations can be characterized in terms of the meanings they express, in terms of their formal means of expression, and in terms of their syntactic functions. It appears impossible to attribute to grammatical relations a constant fixed meaning and a constant form, whether across languages or within a single language, and the decisive diagnostic role in the identification of grammatical relations is played not by the means of encoding, but by syntactic tests. In many languages identity of syntactic behavior of constituents differing in form serves as the main criterion for grouping them into a single grammatical relation. From a functional viewpoint one can say that grammatical relations rank-order the noun phrases in a clause on the basis of the values of a number of parameters in accordance with the noun phrases' overall communicative significance in the concrete utterance. In contrast to the traditional view of grammatical relations as universal concepts characterisitic of any language, contemporary grammatical theory argues that grammatical relations are by no means characteristic of all languages and that they may be filled by varied content in different languages.