In this long-awaited book—the first in a three-volume work—David M. Perlmutter has co-authored and edited ten essays that introduce relational grammar, a novel conception of sentence structure that offers far-reaching conclusions for universal grammar. The basic ideas of relational grammar can be simply stated. First, grammatical relations such as 'subject of,' 'direct object of,' and 'indirect object of,' are needed to characterize the class of grammatical constructions in the clausal syntax of natural languages, to formulate universals of grammar, and to construct adequate and insightful grammars of individual languages. Second, the range of linguistic variation in word order and case patterns makes it impossible to define grammatical relations in terms of phrase structure configurations or case. Rather, grammatical relations must be taken as primitive notions of linguistic theory. The papers collected here take up the first of these ideas. They lay out the basic theoretical constructs of relational grammar and discuss three areas of grammar—advancement construction, raising, and clause union. In his introduction, Perlmutter discusses each of the papers—most of which are published here for the first time—and places them in the context of the whole of linguistic study.

This collection of nine original syntactic studies carried out within the framework for syntactic theory and description known as Relational Grammar provides a state-of-the-art survey of this and allied fields. In relational theory, grammatical relations such as subject, direct object, and predicate are taken to be theoretical primitives which permit the definition of formal objects called Arcs, the fundamental building blocks of syntactic structures. Edited by Paul M. Postal and Brian D. Joseph, this volume is the third in a series highlighting work in Relational Grammar. It extends the foundational studies of the first two volumes to refine and modify the insights, analyses, and theoretical devices developed in earlier connections, while at the same time providing support for some of the earlier constructs and claims. Of the nine papers, four treat various aspects of advancements to and demotions from indirect object; three deal with raising and clause union constructions, in which initial immediate constituents of one structure are nonimmediate constituents of another; and two are concerned with problems in the description and formalization of verbal agreement systems. The nine articles cover languages ranging from Chamorro to English, French, Georgian, Greek, Japanese, Kek'chi, Korean, Southern Tiwa, Spanish, and Tzotzil.

Vol. 2 coed. by Carol G. Rosen ; Vol. 3 ed. by Paul M. Postal and Brian D. Joseph.

Relational Grammar had its beginnings in the early 1970s. In this theory of the structure of language grammatical relations are taken to be `undefined primitives'. The set of relations recognised includes subject, direct object, indirect object and a number of `oblique' relations including benefactive, locative and instrumental. This is the first book that describes the theory's basic ideas, evaluates them and compares them with other approaches in other theories. The treatment is straightforward, and should be comprehensible to anyone conversant with traditional grammatical terminology. All unfamiliar terms and conventions are explained and illustrated. The book is written for students of modern theories of grammar, but it should also be of relevance and interest to descriptive and comparative linguistics. It contains a wealth of data on morphology and syntax and also includes comparisons of Relational Grammar analyses with those of 'non-aligned' linguistics who are working with much the same data.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Syntax is the definitive guide to a key area of linguistic study.

Even though the range of phenomena syntactic theories intend to account for is basically the same, the large number of current approaches to syntax shows how differently these phenomena can be interpreted, described, and explained. The goal of the volume is to probe into the question of how exactly these frameworks differ and what if anything they have in common. Descriptions of a sample of current approaches to syntax are presented by their major practitioners (Part I) followed by their metatheoretical underpinnings (Part II). Given that the goal is to facilitate a systematic comparison among the approaches, a checklist of issues was given to the contributors to address. The main headings are Data, Goals, Descriptive Tools, and Criteria for Evaluation. The chapters are structured uniformly allowing an item-by-item survey across the frameworks. The introduction lays out the parameters along which syntactic frameworks must be the same and how they may differ and a final paper draws some conclusions about similarities and differences. The volume is of interest to descriptive linguists, theoreticians of grammar, philosophers of science, and studies of the cognitive science of science.

The papers in this volume examine the current role of grammatical functions in transformational syntax in two ways: (i) through largely theoretical considerations of their status, and (ii) through detailed analyses for a wide variety of languages. Taken together the chapters in this volume present a comprehensive view of how transformational syntax characterizes the elusive but often useful notions of subject and object, examining how subject and object properties are distributed among various functional projections, converging sometimes in particular languages.