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Grammatical Relations and Surface Cases

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Masayoshi Shibatani
Masayoshi Shibatani*
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Abstract

While relational grammar regards grammatical relations as theoretical primitives that play a central role in the formulation of syntactic rules, there has been no critical assessment of the fact that grammatical relations and surface cases are often confused by both traditional and transformational grammarians. This paper shows that grammatical relations and cases must be clearly distinguished, as there are distinct rules that are sensitive to each. Investigation of the data from Japanese and Korean specifically shows that, in these languages, the rule of Quantifier Floating—which the proponents of relational grammar have alleged to be universally sensitive to grammatical relations—must, in fact, be stated in terms of cases, while the rules of Reflexivization and Subject Honorification must be formulated in terms of grammatical relations. In addition to these syntactic processes, this paper critically examines whether there are, in fact, two subjects in the so-called double-subject construction in Japanese.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , December 1977 , pp. 789 - 809
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by Linguistic Society of America

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