Objects and other subjects : grammatical functions, functional categories, and configurationality ; [papers presented at a workshop held July 1999 at the LSA Linguistic Institute, Urbana-Champagne, Ill

"Grammatical functions, readily identifiable informally in particular languages, have had an uncertain status in generative grammar. Despite Chomsky's assertion in Aspects that they are not theoretical primitives (a position vigorously challenged by a number of well-known theories), the role of functions such as subject and object has become increasingly prominent as Chomskyan linguistics has developed. As statements of principles and rules of grammar have grown to incorporate these notions, the position that grammatical functions are not primitives has come to merit scrutiny. The papers in this volume examine the current role of grammatical functions in transformational syntax in two ways: (i) through largely theoretical considerations of their status and (ii) through detailed analyses for a wide variety of languages. Taken together the chapters in this volume present a comprehensive view of how transformational syntax characterizes the elusive but often useful notions of subject and object, examining how subject and object properties are distributed among various functional projections, converging sometimes in particular languages."--Jacket Title Page......Page 2 Table of Contents......Page 6 List of Contributors......Page 8 Forword......Page 10 Acknowledgments......Page 14 REMARKS ON GRAMMATICAL FUNCTIONS IN TRANSFORMATIONAL SYNTAX......Page 16 PHRASE SlRUCTURE AS A REPRESENTATION OF "PRIMITIVE" GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS......Page 36 GRAMMATICAL FUNCTIONS, THEMATIC ROLES, AND PHRASE STRUCTURE: THEIR UNDERLYING DISUNITY......Page 68 IS CASE ANOTHER NAME FOR GRAMMATICAL FUNCTION? EVIDENCE FROM OBJECT ASYMMETRIES......Page 92 SUBJECTS, OBJECTS, AND THE EPP......Page 118 DERIVED OBJECTS IN MALAGASY......Page 138 THE DISTRIBUTION OF SUBJECT PROPERTIES IN IRISH......Page 172 THE EPP IN SPANISH......Page 208 ON PREDICATION AND THE STATUS OF SUBJECTS IN NIUEAN......Page 240 FUNCTIONAL ARCHITECTURE AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF SUBJECT PROPERTIES......Page 262 REFERENCES......Page 296 AUTHOR INDEX......Page 312 SUBJECT INDEX......Page 316