Coding and Behavioural Properties within Grammatical Relations
Author(s): Madalina Cerban / Language(s): English
/ Issue: 2/2010
Keywords: grammatical relations; semantic roles; coding properties; behavioural properties
The purpose of this article is to discuss grammatical relations in a
sentence within a relational framework, and to make a comparison, wherever
possible, between English and Romanian language. The notion ‘grammatical
relation’ is well established (Blake, 1994: 48–93, Palmer 1994, Givón 2001:
173–232), being a theory of descriptive grammar in which syntactic
relationships define better grammatical processes than syntactic structures. The
central idea of relational grammar is that there is a limited number of
grammatical relations (Subject [SU], Direct Object [DO], and Indirect Object
[IO]), such that one term can bear more than one such relation at different
levels or 'strata' of the structure underlying the clause. In other words,
relational grammar conceives of a clause as a network of grammatical
relations. We concentrate especially on syntactic aspects because many
important syntactic phenomena involve grammatical relations and, as a result
these concepts would be important for the description and for the explanation of
these phenomena.
Grammatical relations have two different properties: coding and
behavioural. Our discussion starts from the assumption that behavioral
properties are acquired historically prior to subject coding properties. Coding
properties are, to a large extent, morphological while behavioural properties
are syntactic, taking into account the involvement of a particular relation in
grammatical constructions. In this paper we will analyse only constructions in
which the Subject is an actor in transitive predications, the Direct Object is an
undergoer in a transitive predication, and the Indirect Object is a recipient or a
goal in ditransitive predications.
(i) Coding properties. The most important coding properties are verb
agreement, case marking and the functions an argument can perform in a
sentence according to its place in the sentence. The first two coding properties
are morphological while the third one is syntactic. We also demonstrate that no
coding properties that can identify any grammatical relation.
(ii) Behavioural properties refer to the types of constructions they can
appear in. If a construction refers to a specific term in a language, then
involvement in that construction is a property of the particular grammatical relation in that language. The analysis of the relational syntactic construction
tries to identify the restrictions that make that construction particular. The most
important syntactic parts that can be discussed in terms of behavioural
properties are Subject, Direct and Indirect Objects, but in this paper we will
concentrate on the Subject which is targeted by the largest number of syntactic
phenomena.
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