Grammatical relationship studies the relationships of elements within a sentence. The subject, objects, additions, and complements determine the grammatical cases and categories of words. The theory of grammatical relations is a counter-theory to transformational grammar. The subject is the most important part of the sentence, and objects can be direct, indirect, or prepositional. Differentiating grammatical relationship and syntax is like dividing a layer cake. The agent performs the action, patients receive the action, and tools are used to perform the action.
Grammatical relationship is a part of linguistics that studies the relationships of elements within a clause, sentence or sentence from a grammatical point of view. The main means of studying it is through the relationships of the subject, objects, additions and complements. These relationships then determine the grammatical cases and categories of the words contained in the sentence and thus help determine the syntax of the sentence.
Linguists have used the theory of grammatical relations to determine the idea of relational grammar and also a further development called arc pair grammar. Both are counter-theories to Noam Chomsky’s ideas about transformational grammar, which looks at the deeper meanings of sentence structure. In relational grammar, the basic grammatical relationships of a language determine the subsequent development of syntactic relationships. In other words, all conceptual notions arise from function and not vice versa.
The grammatical relationship that the subject has with the verb and the object determines its structure. This makes the subject the most important part of the sentence. In the sentence “Bob hit Jim with a cream pie,” Bob is the subject and determines the form of the rest of the sentence.
Objects are a thing or a person that refers to the subject. There can be no objects, one object or multiple objects within a clause or sentence. In the sentence “Bob hit Jim with a cream pie,” Jim is the first item and the cream pie is the second item. There are three types of objects: direct, indirect and prepositional.
An addition is additional information, which can be removed without making the sentence lose its meaning. For example, “Bob hit Jim” is just as effective as “Bob hit Jim with a cream pie.” Complement is additional information that must be included. For example, “Bob throws” has no real meaning unless the reader knows what is being thrown; the complement to this sentence would be “a cream cake”.
In the field of grammatical relation, the subject is always the subject and the object is always the object. This is the main difference between grammatical relationship and syntax. Once the basic functions and forms of all the words in the sentence have been determined, their thematic or syntactic values can be identified.
Differentiating grammatical relationship and syntax in this sense is like dividing a layer cake. The cake layer is the function and the cream layer is the thematic value. While the subject and the object are constant, one of them can be the agent or the patient, or even the instrument in syntactic terms.
The agent is the person or object that performs the action. The patients are the ones who receive the action. The tools are used to perform the agent action. The following three sentences demonstrate how the grammatical relationship of words determines syntactic functions:
“Bob threw a cream pie at Jim.”
“Bob was hit by a cream pie thrown by Jim.”
“Bob was thrown by Jim at the cream pie.”
In all three sentences, Bob is the subject and Jim and the cream pie are objects. Syntactically, however, the subject-verb relationship determined different values. This means that Bob is the agent in the first, the patient in the second and the instrument in the third.
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