Objecthood
- In: Plank, F., ed. 1984. Objects. Towards a theory of grammatical relations. 29-54. London and New York: Academic Press.
- Objecthood reviews the familiar notional, configurational, positional, inflexional and behavioural properties commonly held to correlate with an argument's direct object function in the clause and finds that object status is a variable both across languages as well as with respect to regularities in a particular language. This variable character of objecthood is incompatible with attributing to it the nature of a primitive/universal grammatical relation. Instead it is argued that objecthood is relevant only in subject-forming languages. In such systems, non-subject abs(olutive) arguments constitute a set of potential objects, of which, in turn, objects are the 'syntactically active' members.
- 19 pages, 255kb
Autor:
Anderson, John M.
Jahr:
1 984
Bereich:
NG
Papers PDF:
