Grammatical Relations

This book argues that the assumption that grammatical relations are both necessary and universal is an unwarranted generalization. InGrammatical Relations,D. N. S. Bhat examines in detail the grammars of two different Indian languages, Kannada and Manipuri, to dispel this assumption. Although languages such as English seem to require grammatical relations, Bhat shows that in Kannada the representations of semantic and pragmatic relations are distinct, and for this reason Kannada does not need grammatical relations when its clause structure is described. Having challenged the claim that grammatical relations are necessary, Bhat turns to their universality. It has been argued that even though such relations are not needed in all languages, the basis of these relations--transitivity--can be used in all languages to describe clause structures. Bhat argues that in the case of Manipuri, it is not transitivity but volitionality that plays a central role in the structuring ofclauses, thus transitivity cannot adequately describe all languages. This provocative hypothesis will be of interest to all linguistic theorists, logicians, philosophers, and scholars working on Indian languages.