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Grammatical Relations: The Evidence Against Their Necessity and Universality
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.
189 pages, ebook
First published September 26, 1991
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March 18, 2011
Reasonably well written. I'm not a linguist and I skimmed through parts of this book, but I could follow a fair deal, and even learnt some new things about Kannada, a language I thought I knew well.
What I gather is this: the book shows that "grammatical relations", like "subject", "direct object" and "indirect object", are not language universals. They make sense in English (to keep the description of the language at a manageable length), because in English "semantic relations" (agent, receiver, patient, etc.) are mixed up with "pragmatic relations" (topic, …), but in Kannada the semantic and pragmatic are separate. Only a familiarity bias of English linguists has led them to postulate that grammatical relations are universals. Kannada has no need for grammatical relations to describe the language, and involving them would only unnecessarily complicate the description a great deal.
There is also a further bit about Manipuri: even though grammatical relations may be useful in describing a language, they still may not be sufficient (in some regard... I didn't read this section carefully).
It may have been nice if he had used more languages as examples (it seemed that many of the examples in the book would work equally well in several other Indian languages, and some even in a few European ones), if only to show that the matter being discussed here is not specific to a pair of 'obscure' (from the Western perspective) languages, but the focus on particular languages is understandable.
A fine work.
What I gather is this: the book shows that "grammatical relations", like "subject", "direct object" and "indirect object", are not language universals. They make sense in English (to keep the description of the language at a manageable length), because in English "semantic relations" (agent, receiver, patient, etc.) are mixed up with "pragmatic relations" (topic, …), but in Kannada the semantic and pragmatic are separate. Only a familiarity bias of English linguists has led them to postulate that grammatical relations are universals. Kannada has no need for grammatical relations to describe the language, and involving them would only unnecessarily complicate the description a great deal.
There is also a further bit about Manipuri: even though grammatical relations may be useful in describing a language, they still may not be sufficient (in some regard... I didn't read this section carefully).
It may have been nice if he had used more languages as examples (it seemed that many of the examples in the book would work equally well in several other Indian languages, and some even in a few European ones), if only to show that the matter being discussed here is not specific to a pair of 'obscure' (from the Western perspective) languages, but the focus on particular languages is understandable.
A fine work.
Displaying 1 of 1 review