On being without a subject
- Bloomington, Ind.: IULC.
- On being without a subject starts out from the central case grammar tenet whereby grammatical relations are absent from basic or initial syntactic structures and only arise derivatively, if they arise at all, via 'subject-formation' on the basis of semantic functional information lexically associated with the arguments of a predicator. In terms of this and given a definition of subjecthood, which capitalizes on the sharing of (non-contingent) (morpho-)syntactic properties by the 'agent' argument of transitive predicators and the 'patient' argument of intransitives, specific language systems or sub-systems simply lack subjects. Sections 2-4 explore the hypothesis of 'being without a subject' against data from Dyirbal, Kannada and English, with the latter two showing lack of subjecthood in 'dative' and nominal predications, respectively. Section 5 is concerned with matters of relational typology and establishes that the grammatical relation of SUBJECT is but one of a set of derived PRINCIPAL (aka 'pivot') grammatical relations alongside those of PRIME and ABSOLUTIVE.
- 46 pages, 414kb
Autor:
Anderson, John M.
Jahr:
1 979
Bereich:
NG
Papers PDF:
