Typological variation in grammatical relations

Chapter 1 argues that traditional grammatical relations, such as subject and object, are inadequate notions in describing the languages of the world, as grammatical relations are both construction-specific and language-specific. The construction-specific and language-specific nature of grammatical relations poses a serious challenge to any attempt to carry out a non-reductionist cross-linguistic research on grammatical relations. The standard response to this problem has been to either concentrate on individual constructions or to disregard the language-internal variation and typologize whole languages as exhibiting a particular alignment pattern. One of the major goals of this thesis is to develop a framework which systematically integrates most grammatical categories known to interact with grammatical relations and makes it possible to explore their typological diversity in their full ranges. After a review of the major developments in the study of grammatical relations (Chapter 2), Chapter 3 discusses the methodological foundation of the present study, and, in particular, addresses the issues of variables and their values in typological investigations and presents the autotypologizing method of variable identification. Chapter 4 addresses the issue of argumenthood and argument role distinction. After reviewing some popular approaches, I present the model of semantic role determination adopted in the present thesis, which relies heavily on Dowty’s (1991) agent and patient proto-role properties. Chapter 5 provides the first illustration of grammatical relations as equivalence sets of arguments and discusses the compatibility of this representation of grammatical relations with alignment in the traditional sense. Chapters 6 to 10 look closer at three common types of constructions which have been playing a central role in the discussion of grammatical relations (viz. case marking, agreement marking, and passivization and antipassivization). In each case, a more thorough investigation of the phenomenon at hand results in the extension and refinement of the list of variables and their possible values that are needed to account for grammatical relations established by these three construction types. Chapter 11 addresses the issue of argument selector distinction and variables required to account for the properties of individual constructions. For this purpose, a wider range of constructions relevant to grammatical relations is surveyed. Chapter 12 draws all the threads together and summarizes the new approach to the typology of grammatical relations.