Grammatical Relations and Change (review)

Approximately half of the papers collected here were presented as part of a workshop on Grammatical Relations and Grammatical Change at ICHL XIV (the Fourteenth International Conference on Historical Linguistics) in Vancouver in 1999. Additional papers were invited following the workshop. The contributors to the volume are: Werner Abraham (‘How far does semantic bleaching go?’), John Ole Askedal (‘Oblique subjects, structural and lexical case marking’), Jan Terje Faarlund (‘The notion of oblique subject and its status in the history of Icelandic’), Elly van Gelderen (‘Towards personal subjects in English: Variation in feature interpretability’), Alice Harris (‘Focus and universal principles governing simplification of cleft structures’), Lars Heltoft (‘Recasting Danish subjects: Case system, word order and subject development’), Alana Johns (‘Ergative to accusative: Comparing evidence from Inuktitut’), D. Gary Miller (‘Subject and object in Old English and Latin copular deontics’), Muriel Norde (‘The loss of lexical case in Swedish’), Lene Schøsler (‘The coding of the subject-object from Latin to Modern French’), and Annette Veerman-Leichsenring (‘Changes in Popolocan word order and clause structure’).

The term ‘grammatical relations’ here refers, for the most part, to the relation between the head of a predicate and its argument phrases (particularly ‘subject’ and ‘object’); some authors, however, use the term in a wider sense, to refer to the relationship between nonlexical heads and their complements.

There is a distinct bias in this book towards data from Germanic and Romance, with eight of the eleven papers dealing with languages from one or both of these subgroups. The three other papers consider data from North-East Caucasian, Popolocan (Otomanguean), and Inuktitut. This is a shame since many of the papers make claims about typological tendencies which cannot be said to have been tested to any rigorous extent because of their bias towards languages from a single family and area.

Despite the small number of languages considered, the book does have quite a broad range of perspectives on such topics as change of marking of grammatical relations, change of category of core arguments, and grammaticalization more generally. Abraham’s paper, for example, discusses semantic bleaching of focus particles, evidential meanings of tenses, and nominative subject representations (among other categories). Johns considers shift of relations from ergative alignment to accusative via the reanalysis of an antipassive in different Inuktitut dialects. Harris examines the grammatical change in focus constructions and shows that languages move through several stages in going from biclausal focus cleft constructions to single clauses with a marked focus position.

Overall, there do not seem to be many new insights in the volume; it is a treatment of well-known topics from Germanic syntax with the occasional non-Western European language for variety. It is, however, a useful summary of the issues and treatments of some interesting problems in historical syntax.