Background
The term grammatical relations is used to denote the relations between a clause or a predicate and its arguments, such as subject, direct object, and indirect object. These categories are among the most basic concepts of many models of grammar and are often regarded, either explicitly or implicitly, as universal. Moreover, they belong to the fundamental concepts in descriptions of most languages.
Until the early 1970s, it was chiefly surface morphological criteria, such as case marking, agreement, and constituent order, that played the key role in identifying individual grammatical relations (e.g. the argument in the nominative case was identified as the subject, whereas the argument in the accusative case as the direct object). The 1970s saw a fundamental change in the discussion of grammatical relations. This was largely triggered by the appearance of a number of important descriptive accounts and an increasing interest in languages in which grammatical relations are organized in a different way than in the familiar European languages, as, for instance, in languages exhibiting ergative traits (e.g. Dixon 1972 on Dyirbal, Comrie 1973, 1979 on Chukchi; Blake 1976 on some Australian languages; Woodbury 1977 on West Greenlandic Eskimo) and the Philippine-type languages (cf. Schachter 1976). Since in these languages, morphological criteria do not identify grammatical relations in the same way as what is known from European languages, it became common to extend the inventory of grammatical relation tests beyond morphological marking and word order and to include syntactic processes as diagnostics of grammatical relations (e.g. Equi-NP deletion, raising, conjunction reduction, passivization, the behavior of the reflexives, etc. cf. Li 1976 and Plank 1979).
In many cases various morphosyntactic constructions of a language provide conflicting evidence. In such cases, it became common to pick out one or a small set of particular construction(s) from a range of phenomena. This construction, or this selection of constructions, was then treated as providing the only diagnostic for “real” or “deep” grammatical relations (e.g. Anderson 1976). Typically, these grammatical relations were then equated with subjects and objects familiar from European languages. As a result, grammatical relations were identified by different criteria in different languages (e.g. by case marking and raising in one language and by reflexive binding and conjunction reduction in another language). This approach was criticized as suffering from ‘methodological opportunism’, where researchers pick “language-specific criteria when the general criteria do not exist in the language, or when the general criteria give the “wrong” results according to one's theory” (Croft 2001: 30).
A natural alternative is to consider all morphosyntactic properties of arguments without prioritizing among them. Under this approach, the various morphosyntactic features and properties of arguments do not necessarily converge on a single set of grammatical relations (e.g. one subject and one object or one ergative and one absolutive) in a language. Instead, every single construction can, in principle establish a different grammatical relation. Thus, instead of viewing grammatical relations as uniform categories, it became common to regard them as construction-specific categories (cf. Comrie 1978; Moravcsik 1978; Van Valin 1981, 1983, 2005; Croft 2001; Bickel 2004, 2011, among many others). And to the extent that constructions are language-specific, this also entails that grammatical relations turn out to be language-specific phenomena (Dryer 1997).
The construction-specific and language-specific view of grammatical relations has become widely accepted in current typology and recent grammatical descriptions tend to provide in- depth accounts of the morphosyntactic constructions defining grammatical relation (e.g. Haspelmath 1993, Nikolaeva and Tolskaya 2001, van de Velde 2006, Genetti 2007). There also have been a number of surveys of the way grammatical relations are established or structured by case marking and agreement (e.g. Comrie 2005; Haspelmath 2005; Siewierska 2004, 2005) and, recently, a handbook has been published targeting the morphosyntax of ditransitive objects (Malchukov et al. 2010). What is sorely lacking, however, is a large-scale typological survey of grammatical relations with regard to the whole range of morphosyntactic phenomena relevant for them, specifically including syntactic phenomena (i.e. beyond case and agreement morphosyntax). The volume aims to fill this gap by compiling over 30 detailed accounts of grammatically relations in geographically, genetically, and typologically diverse languages of the world prepared by experts working on individual languages.
Goals and prospective outcomes
The major goal of the proposed volume is to fill the existing gap in in-depth surveys of grammatical relations in the languages of the world. Beyond this, the survey will make it possible to evaluate theoretical and typological claims, including such proposals as ‘the Subject Construction Hierarchy’ (defining what constructions are more likely than others to exhibit ergative alignment).
Volume content
The volume will contain an introductory chapter by the editors, around 30 contributions of up to 30 pages on individual languages, and a final discussion chapter by the editors.
We expect individual chapters to include the following information:
- geographical distribution, genealogical affiliation, and a short typological overview of the respective language
- a detailed account of all relevant argument selectors (i.e. constructions): these include but are not limited to morphological marking, constituent order, various types of diathesis alternation mechanism (restricted to semantic arguments), restrictions on the interpretation of gapped arguments and possibilities of gapping in case of clause linkage (traditionally referred to as raising and control constructions, conjunction reductions, various type of non-finite clause restrictions, etc.) and any other morphosyntactic property restricted to a subset of arguments. Apart from providing the specifications of the relevant argument selector, individual accounts will includes
- information on properties of arguments of one- and two-place predicates, and – to the extent possible – also of three-place (ditransitive) predicates
- information on non-canonically marked or non-canonically behaving semantic arguments and the respective predicate classes, including details of the semantic profile of such classes and their size (number of items)
- information on any kind of split in argument selection, for instance, if morphosyntactic properties are affected by referential properties of arguments (e.g. definiteness, animacy, etc.), properties of the clause (TAM, polarity, nature of other arguments, etc.)
- information on the morphosyntactic properties of promoted and demoted arguments in the major diathesis alternation constructions (passivization, antipassivization), particularly if the derived arguments are different from the non- derived ones (e.g. in traditional terms, do not acquire or do not lose all properties of, say, ‘subjects’)
- information on what distinguishes individual argument selectors from similar constructions (e.g. in case of clause linking constructions the exact specifications of particular clause linkage types and in what regards they differ from the ones which are not restricted to particular arguments, etc.)
- information on the co-dependencies between individual argument selectors (e.g. when a particular syntactic behavior is restricted to arguments in a particular case)