Grammatical functions and case marking

ISRA YOUSIF 200255

RASBAH KHAN 200238
MANSOOR AHMED 200270
FAISAL BILAL KHAN 200246
Grammatical functions 
• Grammatical functions are the roles that different constituents (strings
of words acting as units) play in clauses. Examples
are Subject and Object (also called Direct Object).

•Compare the following examples. How do they differ in meaning?

 The police attacked the demonstrators.
 The demonstrators attacked the police.
•In the first example, the police are the ones doing the attacking, whereas
in the second the police are the ones being attacked.
 Grammatical functions 
•Grammatically what's happening here is that the same noun phrase, the police, occurs
with a different grammatical function in each example:
 The police attacked the demonstrators. [Subject]
 The demonstrators attacked the police. [Object]
•In the first example, the noun phrase the police is positioned before the verb and
functions as Subject. In the second, it is positioned after the verb and functions
as Object.
•The form is the same (the police is a noun phrase in both cases), but the function is
different.
•The examples we looked at describe an action of attacking, involving two participants:
the agent carrying out the attack and the patient (or 'undergoer') affected by the attack.
 Grammatical functions 
•But what about this example? Is there an action with an agent and patient?
 The students know the answer.
•This example involves ‘knowing’ – which is not an action but a state of affairs. The
students are not agents ‘acting on’ the answer.
•But this clause has the same kind of grammatical pattern as the ‘attacking’ examples. It has
a Subject (the students) before the verb and an Object (the answer) after it.
•This means we can’t define grammatical functions purely in terms of meanings such as
agent and patient.
•Instead we need to look at the grammatical behaviour of phrases, for example:
 What is their position in the clause?
 How do they relate to other elements?
 Lexical Conceptual Structure (LCS):
• Proper semantic interpretation of predicates.
• Consider the English verb to hit.
• A complete LCS of to hit would include that it denotes a movement in
which an object is moved towards another one, and makes contact with
that object with considerable force.
Predicate Argument Structure (PAS):
• is an abstraction from the information contained in the LCS of a word.
• represented as
HIT, x, y
• TO HIT denotes an event in which at least two participants are involved:
• the person who hits , and what is hit.

CORE
ARGUMENTS

• John hit the ball.

Predicate Argument Structure

VERB
The arguments of PAS are represented
as variables such as x and y, which CORE
ARGUMENTS
will receive a particular value in each
concrete sentence. In the sentence John john ball
hit the ball, the value of x = John, and
the value of y = the ball. X y
Semantic roles
VERB
• The notion Agent refers to the entity that is
in control of the event expressed by the CORE
verb. The Patient is involved in the event, ARGUMENTS

but is not in control. Such semantic roles

(also called thematic roles) are john ball
generalizations about the roles of
participants in events denoted by verbs
AGENT PATIENT
GRAMMATICAL ROLE
• Our grammar of English now has VERB

to state that these two arguments

are normally expressed by the CORE
grammatical subject and the ARGUMENTS

grammatical object of the clause

respectively. JOHN BALL

GRAMMATICAL GRAMMATICAL
SUBJECT OBEJCT
RELATIONSHIP
VERB

CORE
ARGUMENTS

SUBJECT OBJECT

X y

Predicate Argument Structure

AGENT PATIENT

GRAMMATICAL GRAMMATICAL
SUBJECT OBEJCT grammatical function frame
•There are also some verbs which requires three arguments. The third one is named as
Recipient.
•Example:
• John gave his sister a book
• Agent= John Patient= book Recipient: his sister
•Adjuncts:
• The entities involved which further specify the event.
•Example:
•John hit his enemy in the back with a stick. So here ‘in the back’ is adjunct and it is optional.
•The number of arguments a verb requires depend om its syntactic valency.
Linking rules:
They predict the relationship between the two levels of PAS
and grammatical function.
1: If there are two arguments, then the argument that expresses
the agent of the action will be expressed as a grammatical
subject and the other as a grammatical argument.
Hit, x(agent), y(patient).
2: In case of only one argument, default linking rule is applied
like for intransitive verb, it will be referred to as grammatical
subject
Word order:
The sequence of words in a sentence is governed by
grammatical function, affecting the meaning.
 It indicates the particular grammatical function
performed by noun phrases.
 Linguists classify languages according to word order.
like SOV, SVO, etc.
 It also helps in elliptical constructions.
 For example,
John hit his enemy, and (he) left. The subject of the
second clause may be omitted but is interpreted with the
word order.
 Elliptical constructions
An elliptical construction is one in which a word or phrase implied by context is
omitted from a sentence, usually because it is a repetition of a preceding word or
phrase. The three principal types of elliptical construction, with the omitted text
enclosed in brackets.
Noun ellipsis: “I went swimming, and John went [swimming], too.”

Verb ellipsis: “She favors romantic comedies, and Jane [favors] musicals.”

Verb-phrase ellipsis: “He went for a walk, but they didn’t [go for a walk].”
POINTS
• GRAMMATICAL FUNCTIONS: Roles of different units playing in a clause.
• LCS
• PAS
• CORE ARGUMENTS: Agent (x) Patient(Y)
• Recipient
• ADJUNTS
• LINKING RULES
• WORD ORDER
• ELIPTICAL CONSTRUCTIONS
 CASE MARKING
• Case is a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of
relationship they bear to their heads.
• Subject-verb agreement, shown in the tree on the left, is a case of head-marking
because the singular subject John requires the inflectional suffix -s to appear on
the finite verb cheats, the head of the clause.

• The determiner-noun agreement, shown in the tree in the middle, is a case of

dependent-marking because the plural noun houses requires the dependent
determiner to appear in its plural form these, not in its singular form this.
 CASE MARKING
• In many languages, morphology is used to mark grammatical
functions, either through head marking or through dependent
marking. Subject–Verb agreement, for instance, marks the
grammatical function Subject by expressing some of the
properties of the subject NP on the verbal head.
• This marking may be used by the language user in order to
identify the subject of the clause. Case marking is a form of
dependent marking which signals the grammatical function
of an NP in a clause
• Nominative-Accusative system:
• In Indo-European languages with morphological case systems the
distinction between grammatical subject and grammatical object is
marked by means of the opposition between nominative and
accusative case.

• If there is only one argument (the case of intransitive clauses), it is

case-marked as a nominative. However, when there are two
arguments, the subject is marked as nominative and the object as
accusative.
•Absolutive-Ergative system
•An alternative case-marking system is the Absolutive-Ergative system that is used
in other languages, such as many Australian languages.
•Ergative is relating to or denoting a case of nouns (in some languages, e.g. Basque)
that identifies the doer of an action as the object rather than the subject of a verb.
• 
•For Example, in English denoting verbs which can be used both transitively and
intransitively to describe the same action, with the object in the former case being
the subject in the latter, as in I boiled the kettle and the kettle boiled. Usually, the
symbols S, A, and O are used for the characterization of these two systems:
• 
•S = intransitive subject, A = transitive subject, O = transitive object.
•‘A’ stands for the subject of transitive sentences.
•‘S’ is the subject in intransitive sentences.
•‘O’ stands for the object in transitive sentences (Instead of O the symbol P (for
Patient) is also used).
• These two systems for marking the
grammatical functions can now be
characterized as:
• In addition, when the single argument ("subject") of an intransitive
verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from
the agent of a transitive verb that is known as “Ergative–absolutive
alignment.” Examples are Georgian and a few Indo-European
languages, such as the Kurdish languages, Hindi and Urdu.
• Example from Urdu:
Split Ergativity
• In linguistic typology, split ergativity is a feature of certain languages
where some constructions use ergative syntax and morphology, but
other constructions show another pattern, usually nominative–
accusative. The conditions in which ergative constructions are used
varies among different languages.
• Nominative–accusative languages (including European languages, with the
notable exception of Basque) treat both the actor in a clause with a transitive
verb and the experiencer in a clause with an intransitive verb in the same
way grammatically. If the language uses case markers, they take the same
case. If it uses word order, it is parallel.
• For example, consider these two English sentences:
• Jane was chasing John.
• Jane was sweating.
• The grammatical role of "Jane" is identical. In both cases, "Jane" is the
subject.
• In ergative–absolutive languages (such as the Basque, Georgian,
Greenlandic, Eskimo–Aleut, and Mayan languages), there is a different
pattern. The patient (or target) of a transitive verb and the experiencer of an
intransitive verb are treated the same grammatically. If the two sentences
above were expressed in an ergative language, "John" in the former and
"Jane" in the latter would be parallel grammatically. Also, a different form
(the ergative) would be used for "Jane" in the first sentence.
• For example, in the following Inuktitut sentences, the subject 'the
woman' is in ergative case (arnaup) when occurring with a transitive
verb, while the object 'the apple' (aapu) is in absolutive case. In the
intransitive sentence, the subject 'the woman' arnaq is in absolutive
case.
• Arnaup nirijanga aapu. 'The woman is eating the apple.'
• Arnaq pisuktuq. 'The woman is walking.'
• In split ergative languages, some constructions pattern with
nominative–accusative, and others with ergative–absolutive.
• In Dyirbal the morphological nominative-accusative case
marking system is used for the morphological marking of
first and second person NPs; for all other NPs, the absolutive-
ergative system is used. The syntax of Dyirbal is consistently
ergative, however, as shown by the fact that in sentence, with
nominative-accusative marking, it is the object of the first
clause that controls the gapped subject in the second clause
• In sentence (19) the omitted subject (S) of “returned” is interpreted as
“we”, that is, as being identical to the O of the preceding clause. This
shows that ergative morphology and ergative syntax are not the same,
and not necessarily linked: a language may have (partially)
nominative-accusative morphology, but absolutive-ergative syntax.
Thank you