On the Nature of Grammatical Relations

This book presents a theory of grammatical relations among sentential constituentswhich is a development of Chomsky's Government-Binding Theory. The cross-linguistic predictive powerof the theory is unusually strong and it is supported in the examination of a wide range oflanguages.Within the syntax of a language, grammatical relations determine such things as wordorder, case marking, verb agreement, and the possibilities of anaphora (co- and disjoint reference)among nominals. Other approaches to grammatical relations have considered them to name classes ofconstituents that share clusters of properties, including most prominently structural positions orcase marking, Still others have claimed that grammatical relations are primitives in syntactictheory, but are related essentially to semantic roles. Rejecting these approaches, this monographdevelops a theory which includes at its core a "projection principle": The syntax of a language isassumed to be a (direct) "Projection" of the compositional sematics, and the mechanisms ofprojection are explicitly spelled out.Chapters cover the two asymmetries and two lexical features onwhich the theory is built; semantic and syntactic data from a wide variety of languages that supportthe universal applicability and explanatory power of these asymmetries and features; features ofpassive, antipassive, dative-shift, anticausative, causative, and applied verb constructions in theworlds' languages explained by the theory; confirmations of the theory's predictions in languagesfor which alternative approaches to grammatical relations fail to provide successful analyses; and,comparison of the book's conception of grammatical relations to those in the GB framework, MontagueGrammar, Relational Grammar, and Lexical-Functional Grammar.Alec Marantz is affiliated with theSociety of Fellows, Harvard University. On The Nature of Grammatical Relations is a LinguisticInquiry Monograph.