BMN ANGD A2 Linguistic Theory
Lecture 9: Grammatical Functions
1
Introduction
The notion of grammatical functions, such as subject and object, has been with us since
ancient times and is one of the main elements of traditional syntactic analysis. However, for
more than a century now there has been debate over whether the notion is a useful one for the
description of all, or indeed any, language and linguists seem divided on the issue. The debate
continues within generative grammar too, though with a particular slant. We will introduce
this particular debate later in this lecture.
Perhaps at its most basic level, the debate over grammatical functions addresses the question
of the universality of notions such as subject. However, even this question is not
straightforward and can be looked at from a number of perspectives. First of all, we might
question whether or not the notion subject is universal in as much as it is to be found in the
description of all possible human languages. Empirically this is impossible to determine as
we obviously do not have access to all possible human languages, most of which are nonexistent. We can, of course, look at all the existent ones to try to determine whether they all
have subjects, but here again we face a large problem of determining whether phenomena
observable in one language is the equivalent to those observed in another. So, for example, if
we take the English sentence John saw Mary, and translate it into Hungarian János látott
Marit, can we justifiably argue that because John is a subject in English, then János is a
subject in Hungarian. Obviously the issue rests on what reasons we have for claiming that the
notion subject is applicable in the two languages and this comes down to the tricky issue of
how we are to define it, something we will turn to a little later on. We will see that there is
disagreement over this too, which makes answering the question of the universality of
grammatical functions rather problematic. Moreover, we also face the issue of whether the
notion is to be defined the same in all languages: it may be that the notion is present in some
form or another in all languages, but that it relates to different phenomena in each so that just
because one element is defined as a subject in one sentence of one language does not
necessarily mean that the corresponding element (if indeed there is such a thing) must be
defined as such in equivalent sentences in other languages.
Without becoming involved in these issues just yet, it should be pointed out that the
conclusion of this debate does not necessarily conclude on the issue of the universality of
grammatical functions as it would be a perfectly consistent view to take that the notion is
universal, even if it is not present in all languages. For example, one can argue that the sound
[ph] is member of the set of possible sounds used in human phonetic systems and so is part of
what constitutes human language. The fact that it is not used in all human languages, or
indeed that it is not used in the same way in all of them, does not detract from the claim that it
is peculiar to human language in a way that other sounds (for example the sound referred to
as a ‘raspberry’ made by putting the tip of your tongue between your lips and blowing) are
not. In this sense the sound is universal, in that it is a potential part of a human language. The
same might be true of grammatical functions: they are part of what defines the universal
human linguistic system, but may not be a part of every individual instance of a human
language. This is clearly not such an empirically simple question to answer, though
ultimately it is an empirical question, and we must rely on the developments of theories to
provide answers.
Mark Newson
Even if we have reason to believe that the notion of grammatical functions is applicable in a
particular language, it is also debatable whether or not the notion is applicable to all sentences
of that language. Here the notion of subject is particularly important as the claim has been
made that, for some languages at least, the subject is an obligatory part of all sentences. For
example, we have seen that for English there are cases where there needs to be a grammatical
subject even if a semantic subject is not called for, in which case we get the appearance of a
pleonastic (meaningless) subject:
(1)
a
b
c
(*it) seems that John left
(*it) is raining
(*there) is a man in my bath
This seems to indicate the importance of this element for the grammaticality of English
sentences. However, there are, of course, English sentences which appear to lack subjects:
(2)
a
b
I want [- to leave]
- get out!
The notion of phonologically empty elements has been used in these cases to maintain the
claim that all sentences have subjects and in these particular cases it appears to be justifiable,
though it would not be impossible to provide an analysis in which no empty subject was
proposed in at least some of these structures.
But not all languages make use of pleonastic subjects, even if there is reason to believe that
there are subjects in other clauses. For example:
(3)
a
b
c
úgytűnik János elment
(Hungarian)
seems John left
piove
(Italian)
rains
van egy férfi a kádomban (Hungarian)
is a man the bath-my-in
Languages which lack pleonastic subjects invariably demonstrate the optional realisation of
meaningful pronominal subjects too:
(4)
a
b
(én) sétálok
I walk
(sono) arrivai in retardo
I
arrived late
(Hungarian)
(Italian)
Arguments similar to those used to favour the analysis of the PRO subject in English
infinitival clauses can be used to argue that there is a null pronoun in these clauses too (to
separate the cases this pronoun is usually called ‘pro’), under which assumption we might
argue that the sentences in (3) also have a null pronoun subject, though of course there can be
no argument making use of the presence of a meaning to support the assumption of the
presence of the pronoun. Instead, the presence of the meaningless null pronoun rests on the
assumption that as other sentences can be argued to have subjects, then so should these. But
this is somewhat circular as it is exactly the assumption that all sentences have subjects that
we are trying to determine the accuracy of.
2
Grammatical Functions
All of the above issues aside, there is one more issue open to debate: are grammatical
functions basic grammatical notions, defined and manipulated by natural human grammars,
or are they derived from more basic notions and are merely epiphenomena? This question is
independent of the universality question as one can believe in a derived subject that is
universal if the notions from which the subject is derived are themselves universal and always
give rise to the apparent subject. It is equally possible to believe in a basically defined notion
of grammatical functions that are not present in every possible human language. We will
return to this issue in a while.
2
2.1
The definition of grammatical functions
The traditional view
As can be seen from the above discussion, much rests on how we define grammatical
functions. Here we will take a look at various ways grammatical functions have been defined
to see more clearly where the problems lye. We will start with the traditional view.
Because the tradition view was based on the study of classical languages whose morphology
allowed for a more varied word order than we find in languages such as English and
consequently the notion of a phrase was not well developed, grammatical functions tended to
be associates with particular words, typically nouns. Furthermore, as was typical of
traditional grammar, there was a heavy reliance on meaning in the definition of grammatical
functions. Two main ideas seem to stand out concerning the definition of the subject. From
one point of view, the subject is the element that the sentence is about and is contrasted with
the notion predicate, typically a verbal element, which denotes that which is said about the
subject. It is clear that this definition equates the notion of subject with that of topic. While
there is a certain correlation between subjects and topics, the claim that the subject is the
topic really cannot be maintained as the two notions are distinct, it being possible to have a
non-subject topic at the same time as having a non-topic subject:
(5)
John kissed her
Pronominalisation is the main way that English (and many other languages) displays
topichood. After its first introduction, a topic tends to be maintained in subsequent sentences
with the use of pronouns. Clearly it is perfectly possible to have a pronoun in object position
at the same time as having a non-pronoun subject, as in (5), and this straightforwardly
demonstrates that the subject cannot be defined in terms of topicality. Moreover, the fact that
subjects can be elements which are not possible topics shows that the two notions cannot be
equated. For example, a meaningless element obviously cannot serve as topic as this would
lead to a situation in which a sentence was about nothing. Moreover, negative elements such
as no one do not appear to be possible topics, as they are not pronominalisable in subsequent
sentences:
(6)
No one came to the party. They didn’t drink all the beer.
However, it is perfectly possible to have meaningless or negative subjects again
demonstrating that subjects are not necessarily topics.
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Mark Newson
The second semantic definition of the subject associates this grammatical function with the
notion agent. Thus the subject is said to be the one who carries out the action. Despite the
obvious problem here that not all predicates denote actions and subsequently that not all
subjects are agents, there does seem to be a relationship between thematic roles and
grammatical functions, as was pointed out by Fillmore (1967). This relationship is not as
straightforward as traditional grammar would like, but seems to be mediated by a thematic
hierarchy, which although it prefers agent subjects, will sanction other subjects in the absence
of an agent. Still, even this complexity does not cover all bases. The obvious case of the
meaningless subject, which is not any kind of argument let alone agent, presents a ready
problem. Moreover there are many well know examples which raise other problems for the
straightforward definition of grammatical functions in terms of thematic roles. Consider the
following:
(7)
a
b
John fears sincerity
sincerity frightens John
Both frighten and fear take an experiencer and theme (in its more general definition) as
arguments. But if the subject were to be associated with a particular thematic role, even if
done so in a relative way, dependent on what other arguments were present, we would expect
both verbs to have the same elements in subject and object positions, which they do not. We
conclude that whatever the relationship between thematic status and grammatical function is,
it is quite complex.
2.2
Syntactic and morphological approaches
Even if it can be demonstrated that there is a relationship between thematic roles and
grammatical function, this does not mean that one is defined in terms of the other. Current
wisdom has it that all syntactic-semantic relationships are interpretative rather than definitive
and so there is no reason to expect that the traditional approach to matter should be the right
one. If we abandon semantic based attempts to define grammatical functions, the correct
course should be to apply syntactic based ones. But here again we will see that things are not
so straightforward.
Syntactically grammatical functions demonstrate a number of phenomena, including Case
morphology and verb agreement. A traditional view would take the subject to be the element
which is associated with nominative Case and which enters into an agreement relationship
with the verb, whereas an object is the element which has accusative Case and does not have
an agreement relationship with the verb. None of these claims turns out to be problem free.
Even within a language which ought to be straightforward from this perspective, such as
English, which has nominative subjects and accusative objects and a limited amount of
subject-verb agreement, things are not simple. For example, English subjects only have
nominative Case in finite clauses and in non-finite clauses, if they have overt subjects at all,
they either appear in the accusative or genitive:
(8)
a
b
[for him to leave] would be rude
[his leaving] was rude
Given that some subjects can appear in the accusative, it is clear that the accusative cannot be
considered as the definitive property of objects. As far as agreement is concerned we can
make the following observations:
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Grammatical Functions
(9)
a
b
there is a man in my bath
there are men in my bath
It is obvious that the post verbal element (the man and men) in these sentences has a role in
determining the agreement form of the verb, but the subject of these sentences is there in both
cases. One could claim that there in (9a) is singular but plural in (9b), perhaps because it
agrees with the post verbal element as in cases such as the following:
(10)
a
b
he is a postman
they are postmen
But this still begs the question as even in (10) it is not clear which of the elements the verb is
agreeing with. The standard assumption is that because in other cases the verb agrees with the
preverbal element, then this is what is agreed with in such cases. But again this involves a
degree of circularity as it is the question of whether the verb always agrees with the preverbal
element, i.e. the subject, that is being investigated.
Once we move away from English and other Indo-European languages, however, things
become even more problematic. One large problem is that not all languages demonstrate
neither Case nor agreement morphology and hence such languages provide no evidence of
having grammatical functions from this perspective. One can argue that as there are
languages, such as English, for which we can argue for the relevance of grammatical
functions on the basis of limited phenomena, these languages are merely an extreme case in
which although there is no overt evidence from Case and agreement morphology for
grammatical functions, we can nonetheless assume their relevance by extension. It is not
difficult to see why not everyone is convinced by this argument.
Even languages which have overt Case and agreement morphology can be problematic for
the assumption that we can define grammatical functions on these bases. For example, the use
of Case to determine grammatical function is complicated by the fact that human languages
demonstrate a number of different Case systems. As has been pointed out by linguists
studying linguistic typology, the use of terms such as subject and object when discussing
different Case systems is unhelpful as it introduces inescapable circularities. To demonstrate
this, consider a simple transitive sentence:
(11)
a
b
I fed him
eniy-ā ziya bišer-si
mother-Case cow feed-past
“Mother fed the cow”
(Tsez – North Caucasian)
There are two arguments in these two sentences, both in different Cases. The first argument
in (11b) has an overt Case morpheme while the second does not. We can assume that this
Case is represented by a null morpheme. If the two languages were equivalent, we might
conclude that in Tsez nominative is overtly marked and accusative is not. However the
following raises a problem:
(12)
a
b
he left
ziya bik’i-s
cow go-past
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Mark Newson
“The cow left”
In the English case, the single argument has a different Case to the post verbal argument in
(11a). Indeed, it has the same Case as it would have in the preverbal position in this sentence,
i.e. nominative. In Tsez however this argument has a non-overtly marked Case form, what we
called accusative previously. If we label the three arguments involved using numbers, 1 for
the single argument of an intransitive verb, and 2 and 3 for the arguments of the transitive
verb, what we see is that English shows the same Case for arguments 1 and 2, while Tsez has
the same Case for arguments 1 and 3:
(13)
English
1
2
3
Tsez
If we call 1 and 2 subjects in English, based on the fact that they are both nominative, are we
to call 1 and 3 subjects in Tsez for the same reason? If this is so, then the notion subject
differs across languages. On the other hand, we can maintain that the same elements are
subjects in both languages, but claim that different Case systems mark arguments differently.
Both of these strategies have been taken. Those who take the former, tend to call the common
Case in transitive and intransitive environments ‘nominative’ and the other Case ‘accusative’
for the English-type system and ‘ergative’ for the Tsez-type system. Those who favour the
latter call the common Case in the Tsez system ‘absolutive’ to highlight the difference
between the nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive systems.
Further complexities arise. For example, there are languages which demonstrate both kinds of
Case systems for different elements. In Dyirbal, an Australian language, the pronouns are
marked in accordance to the nominative-accusative pattern while other nouns are marked in
accordance with the ergative-absolutive(nominative) pattern. If we maintain that the subject
is to be defined in terms of nominative(absolutive) Case, then sentences with a nominal
pronoun and an absolutive noun will have two subjects, where as the equivalent sentence
with an accusative pronoun and an ergative noun will have no subject!
Agreement phenomena does not fare any better cross-linguistically. There are languages
which do not demonstrate agreement morphology at all, there are languages which
demonstrate agreement with both the subject and the object (Chukchi – an Eastern Siberian
language – for example. Also consider the Hungarian látlak, ‘I saw you’.) There are even
some languages where the verb agrees only with what would be considered the object in a
standard nominative-accusative language, Tigre – an Eritrean Semitic language – for
example:
(14)
lilat
la chifort
chefat-to
Lilet(fem) the chifort(masc) boiled-masc
“Lilet boiled the chifort”
In such cases it might be argued that the subject agreement is marked by a null morpheme,
but then we could also, by extension, argue that languages which demonstrate only subject
agreement overtly also have object agreement covertly. If this is so, then clearly agreement
cannot be used to define grammatical function as agreement does not distinguish one
argument from another.
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Grammatical Functions
It can easily be seen that there is much room for debate concerning how to define and identify
grammatical functions and hence it is not surprising that there are many opinions concerning
the issue of the universality of grammatical functions. There is one aspect of grammatical
functions that we have not yet touched upon concerning their syntactic definition, which is
their structural position. This has been the central point of defining grammatical functions for
certain linguists within the generative school. Again, opinions vary and there is room for
debate. We will now shift focus to these issues.
3
The structural approach and Transformational Grammar
Unsurprisingly, the structural approach to the definition of grammatical functions stems from
the ideas of the American structuralists, though they themselves rejected the idea that
grammatical functions were universal. In fact the structuralist view, known as Linguistic
Relativity, denies the existence of any linguistic universal. This has its roots in work by Boaz
(1911), who argued that one could only understand cultural and linguistic systems in their
own terms and that imposing interpretations on these on the basis of other cultural and
linguistic systems was misguided and inevitably led to inaccuracies in analysis. Grammatical
functions may well be useful for the description of Indo-European languages, but it was
wrong to impose them on other languages, such as the Amerindian language families.
The structuralist view of grammatical functions also diverts from the traditional view in that
grammatical functions were associated with phrases rather than words. From distributional
analyses, one can argue that grammatical functions are associated with structural positions,
though not necessarily the same position in all languages.
The structural definition of grammatical functions was adopted by Chomsky from an early
time, defining the subject as the NP that is an immediate constituent of the sentence whereas
the object is the NP that is an immediate constituent of the VP:
(15)
S
NP
VP
V
NP
Two important points follow from this view. First, if we define grammatical functions in
terms of structural positions, then anything which occupies these positions is to be associated
with these grammatical functions. If we combine this with the idea that elements can move
from one position to another we approach the idea that NPs can gain grammatical functions
by moving into the relevant position. Thus in a passive the argument associated with object in
the active moves to the subject position and therefore becomes the subject by movement.
From this point of view, grammatical functions are not basic elements of the system, but are
derived notions defined only at S-structure. Thus it would be in accurate to claim that in the
passive the object moves to subject position, as prior to movement, at D-structure, there is no
object, this being a notion of S-structure. In the 1980s it came to be believed that all subjects
are derived by movement and that at D-structure the subject position is always empty
(something known as the VP internal subject hypothesis, which claimed that all arguments
originate within the VP and one, the subject, move out in order to get Case, Koopman and
Sportiche 1991).
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Mark Newson
From this perspective, it is possible that a language has no subject, if there is nothing that
moves to the subject position. For example, Arabic has two basic word orders, one in which
the verb follows one of its arguments and agrees with it and another in which the verb
precedes all its arguments and has a default 3rd person singular agreement:
(16)
a
Qara?-a al-tulaab-u
al-kutub-a
read-past the students-nom the books-acc
“the students read the books”
al-tulaab-u
qara?-uu
al-kutub-a
the-students-nom read-past-3pl. the books-acc
“the students read the books”
b
These facts can be captured under the following assumptions. In all clauses the verb moves
out of the VP to merge with the tense inflection. The arguments however may remain inside
the VP or one can move to the subject position in front of the tensed verb. When the subject
position is filled, the verb agrees with whatever is in that position, when it is not filled the
verb takes on a default form, not agreeing with any element:
(17)
a
V1+tns [VP NP t1 NP]
b
NP2 V1+tns+agr [VP t2 t1 NP]
From the derivational point of view, only the second construction has a subject.
The second important consequence of the structural definition of grammatical functions
concerns the asymmetry that the definition supposes. In (15) it is clear that subject and object
positions are not equivalent, with the subject being higher in the structure than the object. In
Government and Binding theory, this asymmetrical relationship, known as c-command (in
(15) the subject c-commands the object but not vice versa), was seen as the basis of numerous
facts. For example, the fact that an object anaphor can take its reference from a subject, but
not vice versa follows if binding is defined in terms of c-command (A binds B if A ccommands B and A and B are coreferential). Given that an anaphor must be bound, it follows
that it must be lower in the clause than its antecedent:
(18)
S
NP
S
VP
John V
NP
NP
shot himself
VP
himself V
NP
shot John
The fact that there exist such asymmetries between subjects and objects has been used to
support the structural analysis of grammatical functions.
8
Grammatical Functions
4
Criticisms of the structural approach and Lexical Functional Grammar
Not everyone agrees with the structural approach, however, and in particular there are those
who criticise the derivational concept of grammatical functions which follow from this. One
of the main problems with the structural approach is that it works only for languages which
phrase structure can easily be established. As we know, phrase structure can be established in
distributional terms. But there are languages which allow virtually any possible ordering of
the words which constitute a sentence, which from a strictly structuralist interpretation means
that there is not evidence of phrase structure at all in such languages:
(19)
witta-jarra-rlu ka-pala wajili-pi-nyi yalumpu kurdu-jarra-rlu maliki
small-dual-erg pres-3du chase-nonpast that-abs child-dual-erg dog-abs
“the two small children are chasing that dog”
The above sentence comes from Warlpiri – an Australian language (Hale 1981) – and it
demonstrates how words which would be collected together in languages which have phrase
structure can be scattered about in this language. Other word orders are equally possible,
apparently without semantic consequence. The only word order restriction seems to be that
the auxiliary, representing tense and agreement (kapala above) must be in the second
position. Even this ‘second’ position is not easily definable in terms of phrase structure as the
second position may be the second word or it may be the second element after an initial
coherent element, which may correspond to an NP:
(20)
witta-jarra-rlu kurdu-jarra-rlu ka-pala wajili-pi-nyi yalumpu maliki
small-dual-erg child-dual-erg pres-3du chase-nonpast that-abs dog-abs
Such languages are often referred to as non-configurational languages and clearly they pose a
problem for a structuralist analysis as well as any notions defined in terms of structure. Given
the word order facts, it is problematic to say what ‘structural position’ corresponds to the
subject and hence hard to define grammatical functions in these languages. However, note
that the language does demonstrate Case and agreement facts which indicates that different
arguments are treated differently and so it is possible to identify subjects and objects on these
observations.
Another problem is the fact that similar subject-object asymmetries can be found in nonconfigurational languages as in configurational ones:
(21)
a
b
Napaljarri-rli ka-nyanu paka-rni.
Napaljarri-erg pres-refl hit-nonpast
“Napaljarri is hitting herself”
* Napaljarri
ka-nyanu paka-rni.
Napaljarri-abs pres-refl hit-nonpast
“Herself is hitting Napaljarri”
This is puzzling if these facts are to be accounted for in terms of the structural asymmetry of
subjects and objects in configurational languages. If there is no structure as such in nonconfigurational languages, how can there be a structural asymmetry of grammatical functions
to account for the asymmetrical binding patterns? Observations such as these have led some
to the conclusion that non-configurational languages are basically configurational at some
underlying representation, perhaps D-structure, and that the free surface word order is the
9
Mark Newson
result of movement transformations. However, this is not particularly convincing for a
number of reasons. First is the fact that binding relations seem to be established at S-structure
in configurational languages. It seems odd that they should be established at D-structure and
unaffected by movements in non-configurational languages. Second, there are no other
standardly recognised movements to be found in Warlpiri: no wh-movement, subject to
object movement, raising, topicalisation, etc. Given the lack of evidence for these movements
it is not convincing to suppose that surface word order is established by other movements.
Finally, movements are supposed to be highly constrained, but the kinds of movements that
would be necessary to achieve the range of surface word phenomena visible in nonconfigurational languages would have to be virtually unconstrained.
It has been proposed that the kind of binding phenomena seen in (18) and (21) may be
explained in terms of a thematic hierarchy rather than structural asymmetry. If this can be
maintained, we do not need to suppose an underlying configurational nature for nonconfigurational languages and can do away with the supposition of problematic movements
in them. However, this also would weaken the structural position in accounting for
configurational languages too. The fact that the notion of grammatical function seems to be
relevant for configurational and non-configurational languages further weakens the structural
account, as it is clear that these notions exist independent of structure.
A rival theory to Government and Binding theory, which developed at roughly the same time,
is called Lexical Functional Grammar. This assumes a number of levels of analysis which,
unlike transformational grammar, are not seen to be derivationally linked to each other by
movements, but exist parallel to each other and are associated by certain mapping rules. One
consequence of this assumption is that the levels of representation do not have to be seen as
being of a similar nature and in fact it is assumed that they are not. One level of
representation, known as F-structure (functional structure) represents the association of
arguments to grammatical functions in a direct non-configurational way. This is mapped onto
another level of representation, C-structure (constituent structure) which models the
language’s configurational organisation. Thus to give a simplified example:
(22)
sentence: John loves Mary
F-structure:
pred = loves
sub = John
obj = Mary
C-structure:
S
NP
John
VP
V
NP
loves Mary
Two points can be made. First a loosening of the relationship between grammatical function
and structure allows much more flexibility not only to account for non-configurationality but
also to account for difficult issues such as the nominative-accusative/ergative-absolutive
distinction. Depending on what mapping there is from F-structure to C-structure it does not
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Grammatical Functions
necessarily have to be the case that the same structural position is associated with the same
grammatical function for all languages.
The second point is that from this view the notion of grammatical function is not a derived
one, but a basic one of the grammatical system. While this does not necessarily entail that the
notion is universal, in the sense that it is applicable to all languages, the tendency is to see it
as such. Moreover the grammar obviously has to eschew any idea of an element changing its
grammatical function as part of the syntactic analysis. So nothing can be associated with
object at F-structure and with subject at C-structure, for example, as grammatical functions
are defined as given at F-structure. For this reason, the LFG approach to passivisation, for
example, has to assume a lexical approach, in which passivisation forms new verbs in the
lexicon with the relevant properties (e.g. with theme or patient subjects). Opponents of LFG
point out that the regularity of passivisation goes against this as lexical phenomena might be
expected to be restricted and idiosyncratic. The debate continues.
5
Conclusion
Concluding in this area is obviously rather difficult. There are too many open questions each
of which have too many possible answers. The best we can hope for at the moment is that
some of the assumptions discussed above can be made to hang together in some kind of
coherent whole and this, even if ultimately incorrect, will enable progress to be made to get
some better understanding of the subject.
References
Boas, Franz 1911 Handbook of American Indian languages (Vol. 1). Bureau of American
Ethnology, Bulletin 40. Washington: Government Print Office (Smithsonian
Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology).
Hale, Kenneth 1981 On the Position of Warlpiri in a Typology of the Base. Bloomington:
Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Koopman, Hilda and Dominique Sportiche 1991 ‘The position of subjects’, Lingua 85, 21158.
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