Relational Grammar

Abstract

Abstract Relational Grammar (RG) (Perlmutter 1983, Perlmutter and Rosen 1984, Blake 1990, Postal and Joseph 1990) is a theory of syntax that is built on the idea that grammatical relations such as subject, direct object, and indirect object are primitive (i.e. basic and indefinable) concepts in terms of which clause structure in all languages is organized. Its use of multiple levels of clause structure, whereby an NP with the patient role, for example, can be the direct object at an initial or “ logical” level and the subject at the final level, make it well-suited to describing the voice and relational-alternation constructions that are so pivotal to an understanding of the syntactic phenomena in most languages, as discussed in Section 2.2, as well as such ubiquitous phenomena as raising to subject, possessor raising, causativization, noun incorporation, quantifier float, and control of adverbial phrases and complement clauses, which are generally constrained in terms of relational categories such as subject and direct object. Coupled with its general userfriendliness, that is its relative lack of obscure and complex formalism, its cross-linguistic adaptability has made it particularly popular among fieldworkers, who have produced accessible and theoretically-informed descriptive work of enduring interest on a wide array of typologically and genetically diverse languages.