Frank Palmer's new book is a typological survey of grammatical roles, such as Agent, Patient, Beneficiary, and grammatical relations, such as Subject, Direct Object and Indirect Object, which are familiar concepts in traditional grammars. It describes the devices, such as the Passive, that alter or switch the identities between such roles and relations. A great wealth of examples is used to show that the grammatical systems of the familiar European languages are far from typical of many of the world's languages, for which we need to use such terms as 'Ergative' and 'Antipassive'. Professor Palmer provides an elegant and consistent framework within which grammatical roles and relations may be discussed, combining a great clarity of discussion with evidence from an enormous number of the world's languages.

Frank Palmer's new book is a typological survey of grammatical roles, such as Agent, Patient, and Beneficiary, as well as grammatical relations, such as Subject, (Direct) Object and Indirect Object, which are familiar concepts in traditional grammars. A great wealth of examples is used to show that the grammatical systems of the familiar European languages are far from typical of many of the world's languages. Grammatical Roles and Relations will be welcomed by all those interested in language typology.

This book is a collection of articles dealing with various aspects of grammatical relations and argument structure in the languages of Europe and North and Central Asia (LENCA). Topics covered with respect to individual languages are: split-intransitivity (Basque), causativization (Agul), transitives and causatives (Korean and Japanese), aspectual domain and quantification (Finnish and Udmurt), head-marking principles (Athabaskan languages), and pragmatics (Eastern Khanty and Xibe). Typology of argument-structure properties of 'give' (LENCA), typology of agreement systems, asymmetry in argument structure, typology of the Amdo Sprachbund, spatial realtors (Northeastern Turkic), core argument patterns (languages of Northern California), and typology of grammatical relations (LENCA) are the topics of articles based on cross-linguistic data. The broad empirical sweep and the fine-tuned theoretical analysis highlight the central role of argument structure and grammatical relations with respect to a plethora of linguistic phenomena.

This book presents a theory of grammatical relations among sentential constituents which is a development of Chomsky's Government-Binding Theory. The cross-linguistic predictive power of the theory is unusually strong and it is supported in the examination of a wide range of languages.Within the syntax of a language, grammatical relations determine such things as word order, 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 of constituents that share clusters of properties, including most prominently structural positions or case marking, Still others have claimed that grammatical relations are primitives in syntactic theory, but are related essentially to semantic roles. Rejecting these approaches, this monograph develops a theory which includes at its core a "projection principle": The syntax of a language is assumed to be a (direct) "Projection" of the compositional sematics, and the mechanisms of projection are explicitly spelled out.Chapters cover the two asymmetries and two lexical features on which the theory is built; semantic and syntactic data from a wide variety of languages that support the universal applicability and explanatory power of these asymmetries and features; features of passive, antipassive, dative-shift, anticausative, causative, and applied verb constructions in the worlds' languages explained by the theory; confirmations of the theory's predictions in languages for 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, Montague Grammar, Relational Grammar, and Lexical-Functional Grammar.Alec Marantz is affiliated with the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. On The Nature of Grammatical Relations is a Linguistic Inquiry Monograph.

Over the last twenty years or so, most of the work on the syntax of Philippine languages has been focused on the question of whether or not these languages can be said to have grammatical subjects, and if so which argument of a basic transitive clause should be analysed as being the subject. Paul Kroeger's contribution to this debate asserts that grammatical relations such as subject and object are syntactic notions, and must be identified on the basis of syntactic properties, rather than by semantic roles or discourse functions. A large number of syntactic processes in Tagalog uniquely select the argument which bears the nominative case. On the other hand, the data which have been used in the debate to assert the ambiguity of subjecthood are best analysed in terms of semantic rather than syntactic constraints. Together these facts support an analysis that takes the nominative argument as the subject. Kroeger examines the history of the subjecthood debate and uses data from Tagalog to test the theories that have been put forth. His conclusions entail consequences for certain linguistic concepts and theories, and lead Kroeger to assert that grammatical relations are not defined in terms of surface phrase structure configurations, contrary to the assumptions of many approaches to syntax including the Government-Binding theory. Paul Kroeger is presently doing fieldwork in Austronesian languages and teaching linguistics to fieldworkers from around the world.

Analiza: Metodología sintáctica y gramática universal; Bases de las "marcas" lingúísticas para las categorías sintácticas; Hacia una definición externa de las categorias sintácticas; Roles temáticos, semántica verbal y estructura causal; Marcas de casos y orden causal de participantes; Formas verbales y conceptualización de los sucesos.

This is the first of a series of 6 books dealing with case phenomena in different languages, both Indo- and non-Indo-European, resulting from work by a team of 20 specialists at the University of Leuven. It is the first time such a large-scale investigation into case has been undertaken, and a remarkable feature of the project is the use of computer corpora of authentic material. This bibliography presents the many dimensions involved in research into case and case-related phenomena. This includes not only morphological case markers, but also the crossconstituent (semantic and grammatical) relations expressed by morphological case or by its various counterparts; morpho-syntactic processes such as transitivity and passivization; and pragmatic and textual considerations. In addition, the bibliography reflects the implications of case research for other disciplines, such as foreign language teaching and artificial intelligence. More than 6000 publications are listed. An extensive Subject Index provides easy access to all the topics and major concepts covered. A Language Index and a Guide to Languages/Language Families conclude the book. The other volumes in the series include The Dative (2 vols), The Genitive, The Nominative and Accusative, and Non-nuclear Cases.