The syntactic functions “subject” and “object” (and a few others) have been an important topic of general syntax over the last half century. Interestingly, the birth of syntactic function typology can be dated rather precisely: It happened in the summer of 1974, in Amherst, Massachusetts (USA), at the Linguistic Institute of the LSA. This was where David Perlmutter and Paul Postal taught their famous first class on “Relational Grammar”, and where many ideas were discussed that had become part of the typological mainstream only 10 years later. That summer school at UMass was thus a remarkable event in the history of syntactic research.

Perlmutter and Postal never published a monograph on Relational Grammar (RG), but the approach nevertheless became influential in the 1970s and 1980s. They were among the first to discuss passive constructions in a cross-linguistic perspective (Perlmutter & Postal 1977), and they came up with the unaccusative hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978). Some of the earliest typological work on causatives came from the RG tradition (e.g. Cole & Sridhar 1977), and the typology of ditransitives received a decisive impetus from this framework (Dryer 1986). The very label “grammatical relation” was introduced into the field of linguistics in that summer of 1974, and while the RG framework is no longer practiced, the term is widely used by typologists even nowadays (e.g. Polinsky & Preminger 2014; Witzlack-Makarevich & Bickel (eds) 2019). For an overview of Relational Grammar, one can recommend Blake (1990).

“Grammatical relation” was first used in this context by Chomsky (1965: 64), but only Perlmutter (who had been a student of Chomsky’s) gave it its current technical meaning in 1974. Chomsky didn’t use the term in later work, and some other frameworks used different terms: Bresnan’s LFG framework has “grammatical functions” (Belyaev 2023), and Simon Dik’s FG framework called the same elements “syntactic functions” (Dik 1997). Since the latter is by far the most transparent term, I prefer it to the other opaque terms, but in any event, it was Perlmutter and Postal who first discussed these phenomena in a cross-linguistic context. (French and German linguists had earlier talked about “valency patterns” and “actants”, e.g. Tesnière 1959/2015; and Russian linguists had published typological books on causatives and passives (e.g. Nedjalkov & Silnitsky 1973), but cross-linguistic work in this tradition merged with the American-dominated mainstream only much later.)

Other influential authors who worked on the typology of syntactic functions in the 1970s were Edward Keenan, Bernard Comrie, and Stephen Anderson – and they were all present in Amherst in the summer of 1974!

That was thus a very special Linguistic Institute, which happened to be held in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Linguistic Society of America. (UMass linguists have posted some nice photos from 1974, showing, among others, Barbara Partee, Emmon Bach, Morris Halle, Sally Thomason, and Larry Horn).

The Perlmutter & Postal course was announced as follows in the institute catalogue (which has been made available online, in a nice gesture for historians):

The “primariness” of grammatical relations meant that establishing tree structures was not important: It was thus possible to look at flagging (case and adpositional marking) and indexing (“agreement”) independently of word order and constituency, and to compare languages with rather different word orders and argument-marking properties. This conceptual shift was a breakthrough from the perspective of the 1965 “Aspects” model that was dominant in teaching syntax, but that did not work well for languages other than English.

Thus, Relational Grammar (and related thinking) was quickly adopted by those who were interested in a wide variety of languages, and at some point, it was also adopted by SIL International in teaching missionary linguists. The ideas became so familiar that nowadays, it is not easy to understand what was so novel about them, but one gets a good sense of then novelty by reading Keenan’s (1975) paper on universals of passives: He noted that passive constructions were diverse across languages in terms of word order and constituency, and there was no way to capture the similarities without general notions of “subject” and “object” that were independent of tree structures. That was a novel insight, and in fact, it initiated the systematic comparison of argument-structure constructions across languages. I think that this represents a good example of a conceptual breakthrough allowing a flourishing of empirical work on a wide range of languages.

Interestingly, not only Perlmutter and Postal were among the instructors at the 1974 Institute, but Edward Keenan was teaching a course on a related topic:

Keenan never came to adopt Relational Grammar, but he was clearly influenced by it, and he may have promoted it in his teaching at UCLA in the 1970s. This may have been the way it was transmitted to his doctoral student Matthew Dryer, who wrote a number of RG-inspired papers (Dryer 1983; 1986). Keenan was at the time collaborating with Bernard Comrie (they met in Cambridge, England, where Keenan organized a typology seminar that inspired Comrie to become a typologist (Corbett & Comrie 2023). Their most famous paper, on accessibility to relativization, was first presented in 1972 (published in 1977), and it operated with grammatical relations, though they were called “NP positions”:

Keenan quickly realized the importance of a cross-linguistically viable “subject” notion for the key claim of this paper, and in his 1976 paper he proposed a way of identifying subjects across languages with diverse structures.

While approaches in the Chomskyan tradition have mostly taken rather different directions, I find it interesting to read about Keenan’s approach in Ramchand’s (2013) survey of argument structure (alternations) in a generative syntax handbook:

“In the clear cases, there is general agreement on empirically isolating Subject vs. Object in natural languages, where many diagnostics coincide. Thus, even in languages with rather different typological properties, it has been argued that the notion of Subject can be defined and has a number of recognizable properties within grammatical patterning. Keenan (1976) argues that the notion of Subject is necessary to account for linguistic generalizations with regard to accessibility for relativization and agreement (see also Perlmutter and Postal 1984). Subject also serves as the antecedent for reflexives, and it is the Subject function that is deleted and referentially resolved in „control“ structures, the Subject function is also the deleted element in 2nd person addressee imperatives (Keenan 1976). Generalizations about choice of Subject therefore remain a robust source of evidence for argument structure, which have some potential for being compared crosslinguistically, even where details of morphosyntactic representation vary.” (Ramchand 2013: 280)

Keenan’s own work had been on Malagasy (he spent 1969-70 in Madagascar, with Elinor Ochs (Keenan); Keenan 2024: 24), but his (1976) paper on “subject” was informed by languages with ergative patterns, which were discussed by Stephen Anderson at the 1974 Institute:

This must have been the first presentation of Anderson’s famous (1976) article on the alleged irrelevance of flagging and indexing for establishing subject status. [Incidentally, the term flagging, as a cover term for case marking and adpositional marking, also comes from the Relational Grammar tradition, but I do not know whether it existed before 1987, when both Bickford (1987) and Aissen (1987) used it in an RG context.]

Comrie had been interested in ergative patterns since 1973, but he was also strongly influenced by Bob Dixon’s work, especially his 1972 Dyirbal grammar (that this grammar was being read and discussed in Cambridge in the early 1970s is noted explicitly by Corbett & Comrie 2023: 187). As early as 1968, Dixon had proposed his own set of “syntactic-semantic primitives”, namely S, A and O (for intransitive subject, transitive subject, and object), and these were adopted by Comrie in 1978 (using S, A and P; see Haspelmath 2011). One wonders whether the relationship between Relational Grammar’s universal grammatical relations and Dixon’s “syntactic-semantic primitives” were already discussed in the summer of 1974 in Amherst.

While looking at the other courses of the 1974 Linguistic Institute, one is struck that there were other classes that introduced themes that became influential over the next two decades or more, such as Barbara Partee’s “Montague’s Theory of Language”, Ray Jackendoff’s “Introduction to Lexicalist Syntax”, Susumu Kuno’s “Functionalism in Grammar”, and David Dowty’s “Lexical Decomposition”. It was truly a remarkable summer for linguistics in western Massachusetts.

References

Aissen, Judith L. 1987. Tzotzil clause structure (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 7). Dordrecht: Reidel.

Anderson, Stephen R. 1976. On the notion of subject in ergative languages. In Li, Charles N. (ed.), Subject and topic, 1–23. New York: Academic Press.

Belyaev, Oleg. 2023. Grammatical functions. In Dalrymple, Mary & Kaplan, Ronald M. & Belyaev, Oleg & Rákosi, György & Haug, Dag (eds.), The handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar. Berlin: Language Science Press. (https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/312)

Bickford, John Albert. 1987. Universal constraints on relationally complex clauses. San Diego: University of California, San Diego. (Ph.D. dissertation.) (https://www.proquest.com/docview/303459018/abstract/1404CF03FFE3438APQ/1)

Blake, Barry J. 1990. Relational grammar. London: Routledge.

Chomsky, Noam A. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cole, Peter & Sridhar, S. N. 1977. Clause Union and Relational Grammar: Evidence from Hebrew and Kannada. Linguistic Inquiry 8(4). 700–713.

Comrie, Bernard. 1978. Ergativity. In Lehmann, Winfred P. (ed.), Syntactic typology: Studies in the phenomenology of language, 329–394. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Corbett, Greville G. & Comrie, Bernard. 2023. Interview with Bernard Comrie. SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 20(2). 187–197.

Dik, Simon C. 1997. The theory of Functional Grammar: 2 volumes. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Dixon, R. M. W. 1972. The Dyirbal language of North Queensland (Studies in Linguistics 9). Cambridge University Press.

Dryer, Matthew S. 1983. Indirect objects in Kinyarwanda revisited. In Perlmutter, David M. (ed.), Studies in Relational Grammar, 1, vol. 1, 129–140. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dryer, Matthew S. 1986. Primary objects, secondary objects, and antidative. Language 62(4). 808–845.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2011. On S, A, P, T, and R as comparative concepts for alignment typology. Linguistic Typology 15(3). 535–567.

Keenan, Edward L. 1975. Some universals of passive in Relational Grammar. In Grossman, R. & San, L.J. & Vance, T. (eds.), Proceedings of the Eleventh Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 340–352. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

Keenan, Edward L. 1976. Towards a universal definition of “subject.” In Li, Charles N. & Thompson, Sandra A. (eds.), Subject and topic, 303–334. New York: Academic Press.

Keenan, Edward L. 2024. Linguistic encounters: A scholar’s journey. Annual Review of Linguistics 10. 19–35. (doi:10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031422-123005)

Keenan, Edward Louis & Comrie, Bernard. 1977. Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8. 63–99.

Nedyalkov, Vladimir P. & Silnitsky, Georgy G. 1973. The typology of morphological and lexical causatives. In Kiefer, Ferenc (ed.), Trends in Soviet theoretical linguistics, 1–32. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Perlmutter, David M. 1978. Impersonal passives and the unaccusative hypothesis. Proceedings of the 4th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 157–189. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistic Society.

Perlmutter, David M. & Postal, Paul M. 1977. Toward a universal characterization of passivization. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, vol. 3, 394–417.

Ramchand, Gillian. 2013. Argument structure and argument structure alternations. The Cambridge handbook of generative syntax, 265–321. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tesnière, Lucien. 1959. Éléments de syntaxe structurale. Paris: Klincksieck.

Tesnière, Lucien. 2015. Elements of structural syntax. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Witzlack-Makarevich, Alena & Bickel, Balthasar (eds.). 2019. Argument selectors: A new perspective on grammatical relations. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

---

---