On causing without a subject

Abstract

Recent work on productive causative constructions within the framework broadly described as Relational Grammar claims to have shown the cross-linguistic validity of a hierarchy of grammatical relations According to this, the subject of a clause embedded under a causative predicate comes to bear in the derived causative construction one of the grammatical relations subject, direct object, indirect object, or oblique phrase, depending on the arguments in the embedded clause. This paper sets out to show that a theory in which grammatical relations are primitive cannot account in a unitary fashion for the syntactic possibilities, viz ‘orderly’ reranking, extended demotion, or doubling, for the embedded subject and proposes an analysis in terms of localist case grammar in which grammatical relations are at best derived functions and, more particularly, subject-formation is a variable