Re: THEORY: Why more than two grammatical relations?

On Fri, 5 Oct 2007 10:49:32 -0400, Eldin Raigmore wrote:

>Some languages (isn't German one of them?) have, in their ditransitive clauses,
>three Core participants; the Subject, the Direct Object, and the Indirect
>Object.  In other languages the equivalent clause has only two Core
>participants; the other participant is indeed an Argument, but it is an
>_Oblique_ Argument.
What's an oblique argument then? I thought an oblique case was any case
except nominative, the "rect" case, so both accusative and dative object
have oblique cases.


>(Isn't German also one of those languages with some "bivalent intransitive"
>clauses, intransitive clauses with two Core participants?  In which case aren't
>some of those clauses analyzed as having a Subject and an Indirect Object,
>but no Direct Object?)
Well, yes, like in the example I gave in the last post. The Duden grammar
lists more instances of clauses with one additional argument that is not an
accusative object (apart from subject + predicate + dative object and
subject + predicate + genitive object):

subject + predicate + prepositional object
subject + predicate + predicative nominative
subject + predicate + spatial/temporal/modal/causal complement


>The Indirect Object is what I meant by a third Grammatical Relation.  It may
>not have been the best example, since some people believe its definition is
>partly semantic.
I for one was taught that grammatical categories originally have semantic
explanations. I am not familiar with the words "grammatical relation" and
"quirky case", so I don't see their benefit yet.

When you're asking, what's the advantage of additional cases, but you don't
want a semantic answer, then I don't know an answer. Why is it not *"I think
you" but "I think of you"? If I don't consider semantics, then I must say,
no idea, it's just quirky. If I consider semantics, then I can say, maybe
there's a semantic difference between "thinking" and plain transitive verbs,
as the act of "thinking" does not have a simple goal, but evoques an
impression, and I could go on searching for similar cases in English and in
other languages.

---
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