Grammatical Relations

This essay discusses the concept of grammatical relations in linguistics, including thematic, configurational, and morphological criteria. It also explores the different types of predicates and their structural configurations.

Running head: GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
Introduction
The term ‘grammatical relations’, in linguistics, is defined as functional relationships
between the different constituents in a clause (Payne & Payne, 2011; Cole & Saddock, 1977).
The standard examples of such relations with respect to traditional grammar are subject,
direct and indirect object.
In the sentence, Manny gave Lauren a book.
The subject Manny is the subject, who is the source of the action, a book
Traditional grammar, even though have vague notions of grammatical functions, on
further analysis it could be seen that the basic definitions do not provide much information.
Grammatical relations are the most extensively assumed concepts in linguistic analysis. Many
modern theories of grammar state that there are multiple other grammatical relations which
could be considered. In the following essay, we will discuss the three major methods used in
identifying grammatical relations from a cross-linguistic perspective. The different criteria
followed during identification have been discussed. These are thematic criteria,
configurational criteria, and morphological criteria.
Discussion
Some common terms that are used to refer to particular grammatical relations are
Subject, object (direct and indirect), ergative, genitive, oblique and absolutive (Aldridge,
2004, 2008). Similar to other notions of structure, grammatical relations are defined
independently of function even though they might possess clear communicative functions
(Witzlack-Makarevich, 2011). Alternately, grammatical relations are relative concepts,
meaning that their existence is dependent upon two related elements. A nominal element on
its own does not possess any grammatical relations but only possesses one when in a
structure where it occurs with a verb and is identified as a subject or an object (Aissen, 1999).
For instance, a word like grape does not possess any kind of relation on its own. Similarly,

2GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
the word sour also does not possess any relational aspect as its aspect of relation is dependent
upon the availability of a reference. However, a sentence like the grape is sour will be
identified as having explicit grammatical relations in its construction. Occasionally, the term
‘argument’ is used to refer to any nominal that is somehow related to a verb or another noun.
Payne & Payne (2011) argues that the term ‘argument’ is a borrowing from mathematics
where an argument is an independent variable found in a function.
Grammatical relations or grammatical functions refer to the nominal elements that appear
in their appropriate structural positions in relation to the verbal elements of a phrase or
sentence, especially between the subjects and predicates, and between verbs and objects
(Bickel, 2010). Grammatical relations can be characterized in formal language analyses in
terms of the meanings expressed, morpho-syntactic properties and structural analyses. From a
cross linguistic perspective, there are quite a few ways in which grammatical relations are
encoded (Müller-Gotama, 2012). Morphologically, the best known strategy employed across
languages is the use of overt case markings (Anderson, 2018). There are indicators of overt
morphological case markings in many languages and language families across the globe, for
instance Greek, Latin, Dravidian language family, Slavic languages, The Altaic languages,
The Australian languages (Blake, 2014) and a lot of the languages of the Austronesian
language family (Liao, 2015). The following points show how grammatical relations as overt
case markers are indicated across languages.
 In Latin and in Russian, Grammatical relations are indicated under overt case
markings through various overt morphological noun forms (Liao, 2015).
 In German for example, overt morphological case markings take the form of different
structural NP constituents like article forms (Liao, 2015).
 In Japanese and Korean for instance, apart from the inflectional morphology,
grammatical particles or words like prepositions and postpositions are combined with

3GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
NP and produces certain analytical elements that indicate grammatical relations (Liao,
2015).
 Similarly, in English too, prepositions are combined with NPs to indicate and indirect
object.
e.g. Manny gave a book to Lauren. Here to + Lauren denotes the indirect object
 In some languages, an overt morphological marking may be indicated on the verb by
the use of agreement where the verb form acts as an indicator of the grammatical
properties of the NP (Liao, 2015).
One commonality of Grammatical Relations across languages is that they will strongly
correlate to the type of verb of predicates (Liao, 2011; Palmer, 1994). In correlation to
grammatical relations, there are four types of predicates that come into play namely ergative
and unergative, accusative and unaccusative. Typically, an accusative or transitive verb takes
one or two objects additional to the subject (Anderson, 1985). For example, in Bill sent a gift
to Anna, the ‘sent’ is a ditransitive verb whereas in Bill hit Anna, ‘hit’ is transitive. In the
second sentence, ‘Bill’, is a nominative NP with an agentive role and ‘Anna’ is an
unaccusative NP with a patient role and occupies the position of the direct object. It is not
possible to find expletive subject use in transitive sentences in English but it is possible to
find some examples in Icelandic, like (Bobaljik and Jonas, 1996: 196; Liao, 2015)
Það borðuðu sennilega margir jólasveinar bjúgun
there ate probably many Christmas. the
trolls sausages
‘Many Christmas trolls probably ate the sausages.’
It is also possible for transitive sentences to undergo passivisation where the agent NP
gets demoted to a lower position and the patient NP occupies the position of the structural

4GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
subject thereby obtaining the case of the structural nominative (). It is also seen that, in active
sentences, the agent NP is generated in the base position closer to the position of the
grammatical subject than the NP patient, thereby the agent NP is able to move into the
position of the grammatical subject.
[ subject position : ___ [ Agent [ V Patient ] ] ]
In the case of unaccusative verbs, like arrive or appear, there does not exist any agent
arguments. The only argument may either stay in the position of the object or move to the
position of the subject as shown in the following examples:
There arrived the four hobbits.
The four hobbits arrived.
In contrast with the transitive and the unaccusative verbs, an ergative verb is slightly
different in the sense that the agent argument projected in the argument structure. Examples
of ergative verbs in English are roll, open, drown etc. The configuration of the structure is
exemplified as:
Jack rolled Jill down the hill
Jill rolled down the hill
Peter opened the gate
The gate opened
[ subject position : ___ [ ( Agent ) [ V Theme ] ] ]
In both the cases, in the first examples, the same case is assigned to the subject and
the object as transitive predicates. In the second examples, the argument theme moves to the
subject position and is therefore assigned a nominative case. However, there is no allowance
for expletive subjects in English ergative predicates. Therefore, in the non appearance of

5GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
agent role the theme NP moves obligatorily to the subject position. In these cases, the agent
argument in this predicate type is introduced by a silent verb (causative) and therefore it is
possible for the first example sentences above to involve an extra null verb cause.
[ subject position : ___ [ Agent / Causer CAUSE [ V Theme / Causee ] ] ]
In the case of unergative verbs like laugh or lie, they can project only an agent
argument and no other relations apart from that. Therefore, the only argument in this case
moves to the position of the subject and is assigned the nominative case. Since there is no
direct object in this type of construction, an indirect object may appear when and if
introduced by a preposition.
Harry laughed (at the boy)
Tom complained (about his dinner)
[ subject position : ____ [ Agent V ] ]
This type of a predicate construction will have the structural configuration as
identified above. There the sole argument is moved to the subject position and is assigned the
nominative case.
Therefore the formal analyses of the structure can derive the vague notions of
grammatical relations from the clearly defined notions of theta roles and cases thereby
mitigating the ambiguous uses of grammatical relations (Marantz, 1981).
From a cross linguistic perspective, word order is also a significant determiner of
grammatical relations. Word order is a key feature that is distinct in distinct languages and
language families (Chung, 2014). It has been concluded that grammatical relations is not
universal in nature and some languages may not even have a distinct grammatical relation
identified. In Irish, the word order that is followed is VSO where the verb takes an argument
and moves to the higher position out of the verb phrase and moves past the structural subject
position.

6GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
Grammatical relations are also denoted through the use of thematic roles. As a matter
of fact, the most comprehensive display of grammatical relations is through the use of
thematic role analysis. Thematic roles are also known as thematic relations and semantic
roles as they are more focused on the functional aspect of grammar than the structural and
syntactic breakdown (Hapselmath, 2003). Thematic roles is capable of providing a semantic
orientation in order to define the grammatical relations, however they are not used to
substitute grammatical relations or vice versa.
Thematic roles are identified as the various roles that are played by the noun phrase with
respect to the action or the state that the governing verb describes. For instance, in the
sentence Gary ate a banana, Gary is the agent as he is the doer of the eating, or the main
action verb. Alternately, the banana is the one being eaten, so it takes the role of a patient.
The following list identifies the major thematic roles that have been identified:
 Agent – One that is a deliberate performer of the action. E.g. Bill in Bill hit the cat.
 Experiencer – The entity in a sentence that receives the sensory or the emotional
stimulus or input. E,g Mary in Mary heard the song or I in I wept.
 Stimulus – The entity in the sentence that triggers a sensory or emotional feeling. E.g.
Gary hates onions.
 Theme – The theme in a sentence undergoes the action but does not change its state.
E.g. I have two pens, I put the gun on the table.
 Patient – The patient undergoes the action and changes the state. E.g. The rocks
crushed the car.
 Instrument – The tool that is used to perform an action. E.g. Anna killed Bill with a
knife.

7GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
 Force –The entity in the sentence that performs the action mindlessly. E.g. An
earthquake killed a lot of people.
 Location – the place where the action takes place. E.g. Gary played baseball at the
park.
 Direction or goal – This indicates the direction that the action is directed towards. E.g.
I walked towards the kitchen.
 Recipient – This is a role where the verb is responsible for changing the patient or the
theme into a new owner of an object. E.g. I gave the book to Mary.
 Source or origin – this indicates the source or the origin of the action. E.g. The car
was driven from Portland.
 Time – This indicates the time at which the action takes place. E.g. The earthquake
killed seventy people yesterday.
 Beneficiary – this indicates a beneficiary for whom a certain action occurs. E.g. I
worked for the local post office.
 Manner – The manner in which a certain action takes place is indicated by this. E.g. I
called my father with great urgency.
 Purpose – This indicates the reason for which the action takes place. E.g. I called my
father to help me fill the bean bag.
 Cause – This identifies the cause behind a certain action. E.g. I was hungry so I ate
the cake.
It needs to be remembered that there does not exist any clear cut demarcation between
these relations and in some cases some of the relations may be found to be overlapping with
another (Aikhenvald, 2007). For instance, a hammer, depending on the context can be
identified as an agent (The hammer hit the wall), a theme (I put the hammer on the table) or
an instrument (I used the hammer to nail the wall). From a cross linguistic perspective,

8GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
thematic relations are possible to be indicated in the case marking on the noun. In Hungarian
for instance, there is an instrumental case marking ending ( - val / - vel ) which indicates the
instrument of a sentence whereas in languages like English, such relations are marked with a
preposition.
It should also be taken care of that the term thematic roles is not confused with theta
role. These terms have been interchangeably used by many linguists. Theta roles are named
through the most prominent thematic relation they are associated with. Theta roles are
syntactic structures that are used to reflect the structure of the argument of the associated verb
(Bickel, 2008). It is possible for a noun to bear more than one theta roles and every noun
phrase can hold at least one thematic role. The main concern of thematic roles is the
identification of the nature of relationship between the meaning of the verb and the meaning
of the noun. In contrast, theta roles are concerned with identifying the number of arguments
that are required in a verb (Altenberg & Granger, 2002).
For instance, in the sentence Mary gave the book to John on Friday,
For the thematic relations, Mary is doing the action and therefore she is the agent, but
at the same time, she is also the source from where the book came. Therefore Mary bears two
thematic relations. The book is the entity that is being acted upon, and thus the book is the
patient. John can be either the goal as well as the direction whereas Friday is the time of the
action.
For theta roles, the verb give requires three distinct arguments. It is identified by the
most prominent thematic relation that is associated with it. Therefore in the entire sentence,
the three required arguments hold three theta roles, namely the agent (Mary), the patient or
theme but not both (The book) and the goal or the recipient (John). In this case, Friday does
not receive any theta role because on Friday is an adjunct in the sentence.

9GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
Thus from the perspective of grammatical relations, Mary is the subject (S) of the
sentence, the book is the object (O) and the indirect object (IO) is ‘to John’.
The third strategy or approach to grammatical relations is the configurational criteria
that is used to define the syntactic relations in reference to the syntactic configuration.
According to this approach, the subject is usually defined as the argument of the verb that is
noted to appear outside the finite verb phrase. While on the other hand, the object is identified
to be the argument of the verb which appears inside the verb phrase (Croft, 2001). According
to this approach, the configuration is taken to be primitive and the grammatical relations are
then derived from the configuration. Chomskyan phrase structure grammar, minimalism
grammar and the government and binding theory are associated with the configurational
understanding of the grammatical relations. Even though it is used as a strategy to identify
grammatical relations, the configurational approach is very limited in its accomplishments. It
does not provide deep insight for the other clause participants like attributes, modifiers and
prepositional arguments, as it fails to elaborate how these additional syntactic functions can
be defined in terms of the configuration (Bhat, 2002). There are difficulties even in terms of
the subject and the object. For instance, in the sentence there were two toffees in the drawer,
posts a difficulty for the configurational approach. While the plural verb were is in agreement
with the post verb noun phrase two toffees, suggesting that the two toffees is the subject, since
it follows the verb, it can be viewed to be located inside the VP thereby making it count as
the object. According to the latter observation, it can be understood that the expletive there
should be considered the subject status.
In order to overcome the difficulties associated with the configurational criteria,
prototypical traits can be used. The prototypical subject consists of a cluster of thematic,
configurational as well as morphological traits (Langracker, 2014). So do prototypical objects

10GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
and verb arguments. From a cross linguistic perspective, it can be identified that there may be
many cases where the subject argument will not be a prototypical subject but will have many
subject like traits and therefore will be granted the status of the subject (Bhat, 2002).
Similarly, there can also be instances where the object argument is not prototypical in one
way or the other but will have enough prototypical object traits because of which it can be
granted the status of an object.
Conclusion
Grammatical relations as features of a language are not always clearly identified.
While the morphological and syntactic analyses of languages and language families with all
their dialects show that there are certain elements in the language that can be identified as
purveyors of grammatical relations, there does not exist a clear cut example where
grammatical relations are explicitly identified or discussed in grammar. Like the notions
regarding grammatical relations being relative to an aspect of noun or verb in a sentence, the
conception and understanding of grammatical relations is also dependent upon inter linguistic
variables like word order, grammaticality of syntax, affixations and even minor cases shifts
and adjustments. Not all languages are structured in the same way, therefore it would be
faulty to even identify that the grammatical relations will also be displayed in a manner that
would be identified as the same across a cross linguistic perspective. Thematic roles and
relations provide a coherent and concise description and understanding of how the
grammatical relations are identified and how they are structured. Similar to the morpho -
syntactic alignment differences across languages, the thematic roles as identified by the
sentence structure also differ. In certain cases, the thematic relations are even identified to
occupy multiple relations for one word in a sentence. This also indicates that the field of
study of grammatical relations can sometimes be vague. Nevertheless we cannot side-line the

11GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
countless research and documentation as well as linguistic, meta linguistic and cross
linguistic parameters that are considered while carrying out
The studies. This in itself opens a wide door for the future study of grammatical relations
from the perspective of the diverse languages that exist thereby helping in the identification
of linguistic intricacies that hide in the lesser popular languages of the world.

12GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
References
Aikhenvald, A. Y., & Dixon, R. M. (2007). Grammars in contact: A cross-linguistic
typology (Vol. 4). Oxford University Press.
Aissen, J., (1999). Markedness and subject choice in optimality theory. Natural Language and
Linguistic Theory 17, 673–711.
Aldridge, E., (2004). Ergativity and Word Order in Austronesian Languages. Ph. D.
dissertation. Cornell University.
Aldridge, E., (2008). Generative approaches to ergativity. Language and Linguistics
Compass 2, 966–995.
Altenberg, B., & Granger, S. (2002). Recent trends in cross-linguistic lexical studies. Lexis in
contrast: Corpus-based approaches, 3-48.
Anderson, J. M. (2018). On case grammar: Prolegomena to a theory of grammatical
relations. Routledge.
Anderson, S. R. (1985). Typological distinctions in word formation. Language typology and
syntactic description, 3, 3-56.
Bhat, D. S. (2002). Grammatical relations: the evidence against their necessity and
universality. Routledge.
Bickel, B. (2008). On the scope of the referential hierarchy in the typology of grammatical
relations. Case and grammatical relations: Studies in honor of Bernard Comrie, 191-
210.
Bickel, B. (2010). Grammatical relations typology. Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian
Senckenberg.
Blake, B. (2014). Australian Aboriginal Grammar (RLE Linguistics F: World Linguistics).
Routledge.

13GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
Bobaljik, J.D., Jonas, D., (1996). Subject positions and the roles of TP. Linguistic Inquiry,
27, 195–236.
Chung, S. (2014). Case marking and grammatical relations in Polynesian. University of
Texas Press.
Cole, P., Sadock, J.M. (Eds.), (1977). Grammatical Relations. Syntax and Semantics, vol. 8.
Academic Press, New York.
Croft, W. (2001). Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective.
Oxford University Press on Demand.
Haspelmath, M. (2003). The geometry of grammatical meaning: Semantic maps and cross-
linguistic comparison. In The new psychology of language (pp. 217-248). Psychology
Press.
Langacker, R. W. (2014). Settings, participants, and grammatical relations. In Meanings and
Prototypes (RLE Linguistics B: Grammar) (pp. 223-248). Routledge.
Liao, W. W. (2011). The symmetry of syntactic relations. University of Southern California.
Liao, W.W.R., (2015). Grammatical Relations. A.E. Kibrik, volume 9, pp. 6342–6348,
Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, Taipei.
Marantz, A. (1981). On the nature of grammatical relations(Doctoral dissertation,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
Müller-Gotama, F. (2012). Grammatical relations: a cross-linguistic perspective on their
syntax and semantics (Vol. 11). Walter de Gruyter.
Palmer, F. R. (1994). Grammatical roles and relations. Cambridge University Press.
Payne, T. E., & Payne, T. E. (2011). Understanding English grammar: a linguistic
introduction. Cambridge University Press.
Witzlack-Makarevich, A. (2011). Typological variation in grammatical relations (Doctoral
dissertation, Verlag nicht ermittelbar).