Grammatical Relations and Clause Structure in Malayalam

Abstract

Arguing that, in order to demonstrate the fundamental similarities between configurational (ie, fixed word order) & nonconfigurational (ie, free word order) languages, linguistic & syntactic theory must incorporate the level of grammatical relations, grammatical relations in the Dravidian language Malayalam are examined within a lexicalist framework on the categorical, relational, & thematic levels. It is shown that Malayalam is a nonconfigurational language in which grammatical relations are encoded morphologically rather than in terms of phrase marker configurations; the phrase structure rules of Malayalam are found to generate categorical structures consisting of any number of noun phrases & a verb. Subsequently, the categorical structures are mapped onto functional structure, & a set of case-based interpretive principles for grammatical relations is developed. It is found that this description of grammatical relations in a nonconfigurational language differs from that in configurational languages (eg, English) only in that the set of descriptive principles is morphologically based rather than encoded in phrase structure rules. The process is exemplified with analyses of Malayalam encoding of control, anaphora, causativization, & passivization. S. Paul.