Grammatical Relations: The Evidence Against Their Necessity and Universality

Title: Grammatical Relations: The Evidence Against Their Necessity and Universality Author: D. N. S. Bhat Language: English (academic) Published in: Theoretical Linguistics (journal article / book chapter) Website: dnshankarabhat.net/grammatical-relations-… (archived 2016, 2018) Status: Not yet collected

Description

This is D. N. S. Bhat’s argument against the universality of grammatical relations (subject, object, indirect object) — a fundamental debate in theoretical linguistics.

The mainstream view (Chomsky’s Government and Binding, Relational Grammar) holds that grammatical relations like “subject” and “object” are universal to all languages. Bhat challenges this using evidence from Dravidian and other language families.

Key Argument

Bhat argues that:

  1. Languages like Kannada do not have a “subject” in the Indo-European/Chomskyan sense
  2. What looks like subject/object in Kannada is better described by case and animacy
  3. The cross-linguistic evidence does NOT support grammatical relations as universals
  4. Dravidian languages provide the key counterevidence

Relevance to Kannada

This connects directly to:

  • Why Kannada grammar cannot simply copy Sanskrit/English grammar frameworks (→ 01)
  • The case system in Old Kannada (→ 14)
  • His broader typological work on pronouns (→ 21)

Collection Status

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