Grammatical Function Change

In English we can say:

(7) The governor broke the law

We can also say:

(8) The law was broken by the governor

In grammatical terms, the sentence in (7) is active and the one in (8) is passive. The law, which undergoes the action of breaking, occupies object position in (7), but in (8) it occupies subject position. The agent, the governor, occupies subject position in (7), but in (8) it surfaces as the object of the preposition by. It would have been equally grammatical not to mention the governor at all, as in (9):

(9) The law was broken

There are times in life when the passive is convenient. Perhaps the governor’s administration needs to acknowledge that the law was broken but does not want to admit publicly that the governor was the one at fault.

In English we can also say:

(10) Solomon made the governor break the law

Here, the governor is still the agent of the verb break, but it is not the subject of the sentence as a whole. Solomon has taken over that function. Sentences like the one in (10) are called causative because they usually express the meaning ‘cause to do something’, or sometimes ‘allow, persuade, help to do something’.

In English we can also say:

(11) The governor broke the law for Smith

This sentence resembles the one in (7), but we have introduced another participant, Smith, the person for whom the governor broke the law.

We could discuss the morphology of break in the English sentences in (7–11), but its forms are fairly limited: broke, broken, break. None of these forms is limited to expressing a passive, causative, or ‘for X’ interpretation. (The -en of broken in (8–9) is sometimes considered a passive morpheme, but it is not limited to passive sentences. We could also say The governor has broken the law, which is active.) However, if we look at other languages, we often find that the passive, causative, and other types of grammatical-function-changing phenomena (we define the term grammatical function change immediately below) are associated with particular morphology. For example, we were introduced to the Kujamaat Jóola causative suffix in Derivation and Verbs in Kujamaat Jóola.

Grammatical function change refers to “alternations in the grammatical encoding of referential expressions,” to use the definition presented by Baker (1988: 1). In (7–8), for example, we saw that the agent can be encoded as a subject or object, depending on the form of the verb used: broke or was broken. Passive, causative, and other phenomena that we illustrate are grammatical-function changing phenomena because they can be seen as triggering the encoding change.

Our goal is to help you recognize various types of grammatical-function-changing phenomena that are found cross- linguistically. We do not analyze them, beyond presenting basic definitions, because to do so would require us to go too deeply into syntax. Grammatical-function-changing phenomena involve morphology-syntax interactions at their most intimate.

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

عبر ممثلية مواكب بابل.. قسم الشعائر يشارك في حملة إغاثة الشعبين الإيراني واللبناني

المجمع العلمي يواصل تنفيذ برنامج قراءة صفحة من القرآن الكريم في صلاح الدين

قسم شؤون المعارف: موسوعة مؤلفات الإمامية تُعدّ أحد أبرز المشاريع الموسوعية التي أنجزناها

قسم الشؤون الفكرية يباشر بتوزيع عدد من إصدارات العتبة العباسية المقدّسة في محافظة واسط

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

عدد مرات التبرز يكشف أسرارا عن صحة الأمعاء

علامات جينية طويلة الأمد تتركها الرضاعة الطبيعية في دم الطفل

هل يمكن إعادة برمجة الجهاز المناعي لإنتاج أجسام مضادة نادرة؟

دراسة: أدوية الزهايمر "لا تحدث فرقا يذكر لدى المرضى"

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

روسيا تطور تقنية جديدة لتعديل خصائص البلاديوم

الصين: طاقم مهمة شينتشو-21 سيبقى في الفضاء شهرا آخر

"أبل" تهدد بحذف تطبيق "غروك" من متجرها وتكشف السبب

"أبل" تهدد بحذف تطبيق "غروك" من متجرها وتكشف السبب

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Affixation in the item-and-process and item-and-arrangement models

Inflection vs. Derivation

Lexemes

An outline of grammatical evolution Conclusions

Evidence from signed languages

Treating events like objects

Nouns and verbs The fifth layer

Nouns and verbs

Layers

The parameters

Grammaticalization

Questions and approaches