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. Continue reading
