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Detailed examination of the grammars of two different Indian languages, Kannada and Manipuri and shows that grammatical relations are neither necessary nor universal. They are examined from the point of view of several linguistic theories.
List of contents
1 Introduction 1.1 Contemporary position 1.2 Two questions 1.3 The need for grammatical relations 1.4 The primacy of transitivity 1.5 Two appendices Part I Evidence against the necessity of grammatical relations 2 The need for grammatical relations 2.1 Differentiating between semantic and pragmatic relations 2.2 Establishment of grammatical relations 2.3 Excluding pragmatic factors 3 Semantics and pragmatics in Kannada 3.1 Preliminaries 3.2 Representation of semantic relations 3.3 Representation of pragmatic relations 3.4 Semantically constrained processes 3.5 Pragmatically constrained processes 3.6 Conclusion Part II Evidence against the universality of grammatical relations 4 Universality of grammatical relations 4.1 Preliminaries 4.2 The notion of transitivity 4.3 Kinds of intransitive and transitive bases 4.4 The notion of verb phrase and of external argument 5 Transitivity and volitionality in Manipuri 5.1 Preliminaries 5.2 The use of case suffixes 5.3 Changing the relative order of arguments 5.4 Conflicts between transitivity and volitionality 5.5 Evidence against an obligatory external argument 6 Theoretical implications
About the author
D.N.S.Bhat is a Professor and UGC Research Scientist at the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India. His publications include Sound Change, Pronominalization, Referents of Noun Phrases, Identification, and An Introduction to Linguistics
Summary
Detailed examination of the grammars of two different Indian languages, Kannada and Manipuri and shows that grammatical relations are neither necessary nor universal. They are examined from the point of view of several linguistic theories.
