A multi-dimensional description of Subject assignment in English: a corpus-based study (1).(LINGUISTICS)(Table)(Report)

Publication: Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: international review of English Studies

Publication Date: 01-JAN-06

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ABSTRACT

The accessibility of terms to the grammatical operation of Subject assignment seems to be constrained by properties which can predict their level of accessibility to this function and which are organised in a hierarchical fashion. The relevance of such feature hierarchies has been stressed in the theory of Functional (Discourse) Grammar, and it is within this framework that the present research has been conducted. Thus, it has been my main concern to test the validity of each of these priority hierarchies in the process of Subject assignment and to provide a descriptive analysis of the different factors determining Subject selection with regard to a particular language, namely English, by analysing a corpus sample of written English and by observing whether different levels of dominance could be determined among the relevant priority hierarchies both in active and passive constructions. On the basis of the results obtained, a new level of hierarchical organization has been suggested as regards these constructions, by presenting a hierarchy of hierarchies (the Prioritising Hierarchy) which describes the different degrees of fulfilment of these hierarchies in the accessibility of terms to Subject assignment in the English language.

1. Introduction

The theoretical model of Functional Grammar (henceforth FG) initially developed by Dik (1997a, b) and recently improved and turned into Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) by Hengeveld (2004a, b, 2005: 54-72) and Hengeveld and Mackenzie (forthcoming a, b), seeks to explain the reflection of the structure of natural languages as regards their main purpose, communication. This functional approach claims that the different linguistic constructions which have been registered in natural languages are the result of the application of different operations to various term positions within a predication. One of these grammatical operations is the assignment of syntactic functions to a constituent of a predication. Thus, many languages, among which English is found, give the speaker the possibility of describing the same state-of-affairs (2) (SoA hereafter) from different viewpoints depending on the constituent within the same predication to which Subject function has been assigned (resulting in active or passive constructions).

Subject assignment in English seems to be determined by different factors which constrain the degree of accessibility of constituents to Subject function. These factors represent hierarchical, intrinsic and functional properties which are presented in the form of implicational hierarchies predicting the priority of some term positions over others in having access to Subject (e.g. Definiteness Hierarchy, Semantic Function Hierarchy, etc.).

In the light of the alleged relevance of priority hierarchies in the grammatical domain of Subject assignment, it has been my intention to test their validity in relation to the phenomenon of Subject selection on a corpus of written English, by following the pluridimensional approach to the study of Subject assignment presented in FG. Thus, semantic, functional and pragmatic parameters which describe the properties attributed to terms and explain the restrictions and priorities which condition the perspective adopted by the speaker when presenting a particular SoA have been taken into account. The analysis of the data has shown solid evidence which has made me wonder about the empirical question of whether the different priority hierarchies could be grouped together showing different levels of dominance and dependence among them as far as passive and active constructions are concerned. Consequently, I can claim that a higher level of hierarchical descriptive organization could be presented in relation to Subject selection for both passive and active constructions in the English language in the form of what I have come to call The Prioritising Hierarchy.

The paper is organised as follows. In Section 2, a brief account of the operation of Subject assignment and of the notion of hierarchy as conceived within a functional approach is presented. In Section 3, the data and methodology used in the elaboration of this research are described. Section 4 deals with the kinds of constraints which influence Subject assignment, namely hierarchical (section 4.1.), functional (section 4.2.) and intrinsic restrictions (section 4.3.). The latter are organised in the form of feature hierarchies which are described individually in sections 4.3.1. to 4.3.6. The last section introduces the conclusions of this research with the presentation of a meta-hierarchy (The Prioritising Hierarchy) which is the result of observable interrelations and dependencies among these hierarchies, and which shows a multi-dimensional description of Subject selection in English for active and passive constructions.

2. Subject assignment and hierarchies: From FG to FDG

The theoretical framework of Classical Dikkean Functional Grammar has stressed the relevance of implicational universals in different grammatical operations. These implicational universals are organised into hierarchies which can be described in terms of priorities which seem to have both intralinguistic and interlinguistic validity and which have been claimed to impinge on grammatical operations such as Subject assignment (Dik 1997a: 279, 1997b: 359-361).

In FG, Subject assignment is studied as one of the components belonging to the Theory of Perspective as postulated by Dik (1997a: 254): "modulations of perspective effected by Subj/Obj assignment". Thus, the function Subject (and Object) is conceived as a pointer (Dik 1997a: 251), i.e. as a perspectival function which indicates the viewpoint adopted by a particular speaker when presenting a particular SoA: in languages with Subject, there is a possible choice between Subject assignment to a first argument (A1), i.e. to the most central term required by the semantics of a predicate, resulting in an active construction, or to a non-first argument (A2 or A3), resulting in what has traditionally been described as passive constructions.

Thus, and following the priorities established by the different hierarchies, a predication frame like the one exemplified in (1) which indicates that a predicate hit establishes a relation between two entities represented by two arguments which carry the semantic functions of Agent and Goal respectively, could be expressed by two different linguistic expressions (examples (2a) and (2b)) (Dik 1997a: 252):

1) Past [e.sub.i]: [hit [V] [([ilx.sub.1]: man [[N]).sub.Ag] [([d1x.sub.2]: dog [N]).sub.Go]]

2) a. A man hit the dog.

Past ei: [hit [V] (ilx1: man [N])AgSubj (d1x2: dog [N])Go]

b. The dog was hit by a man.

Past ei: [hit [V] (ilx1: man [N])Ag (d1x2: dog [N])GoSubj]

In example (2a), the SoA has been described from the standpoint of the A1, to which Subject function has been assigned, and as a consequence, results in an active sentence. In example (2b), on the contrary, Subject function has been assigned to a non-first argument carrying the semantic function Goal, which means that there has been a change in the perspective adopted to describe the predication, and the resulting linguistic expression is a passive sentence.

The new version of FG, Functional Discourse Grammar, attempts to devise a grammar which apart from being pragmatically and typologically adequate is also psychologically adequate, thus proposing a radical shift from sentence to discourse in the object of study, and describing the language production process as a top-down rather than bottom-up process in which the grammatical component, which is included in a wider theory of verbal communication where a conceptual, a contextual and output component are also envisaged, is made up of different levels of linguistic organization. Within the modular reorganization of the different levels of organization, the interpersonal, representational and structural levels work simultaneously and are organised into a hierarchical layering. In this attempt to improve Classican Dikkean Functional Grammar, Mackenzie (2000, 2004) has also proposed his own model, Functional Incremental Grammar, whose main contribution is to achieve psychological adequacy by seeing "discourse production as a dynamic process occurring in real time and the expression of the clause as a similarly real-time process" (Mackenzie 2004:182).

Within FDG, syntactic functions are located at the structural (morphosyntactic) level, and are regarded as grammatical notions which become operative once the pragmatic (interpersonal level) and semantic (representational level) functions have been assigned. Expression rules will finally determine the term which should be assigned Subject or Object function. Thus, there has been a change from FG to FDG in the sense that syntactic functions are no longer defined as purely perspectival notions which show the viewpoint adopted by a speaker when presenting a particular SoA (Dik 1997a: 251), but are rather regarded as grammatical notions which are the result of pragmatic and semantic choices at higher levels (Hengeveld 2005: 72):

In FG functions play an important role: semantic functions are part of FG predicate frames, pragmatic and syntactic functions are assigned to constituents. In FDG ... pragmatic functions are part of interpersonal frames, semantic functions are included in representational frames, and syntactic functions, in languages in which they are relevant, are part of the morphosyntactic clause templates. Syntactic functions are thus no longer considered to be prespectivizing in nature, as they are in FG. Rather, they are matched to pragmatic and semantic units as part of the encoding operation. The pivotal nature of syntactic functions can thus be attributed to the semantic and pragmatic factors that trigger their occurrence.

As was briefly mentioned in the introduction, the degree of accessibility of term positions to grammatical operations is conditioned and restricted by hierarchical, functional and intrinsic properties which reflect semantic, pragmatic and cognitive priorities which can be collected in linear sequences of the form "x > y > z", where the items placed at the left of the scale will me more accessible to a particular grammatical operation than the items located at the right end of the scale. These sequences are called hierarchies and are conceived as sequences "of properties, claimed to be of absolute or statistical validity, such that a preceding property can occur without the following properties but not the other way around" (Dik 1997a: 31). The relevance of hierarchies for the study of natural languages lies in the fact that they reflect both cognitive aspects, which are determined culturally as well as psychologically, and pragmatic aspects, which are associated with the deictic centre of the speaker, that is, with what is more familiar and closer to the speaker's pragmatic information. Thus, and according to the predictions established by these hierarchies, that information which is closer to the speaker will be placed first in the linear order of the constituents of a predication. Besides, these hierarchies give information about the frequency of use of certain grammatical constructions in natural languages, rather than information about the possibility or impossibility of using such constructions (Dik 1997a: 36).

Hierarchies, in addition, can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, they can be understood as implicational universals which describe priorities that are typologically relevant. Implicational universals not only typify the types of linguistic patterns which may be found across languages but also point out those aspects which differentiate them as regards the linguistic subdomain to which the hierarchy has been applied, by characterising, for instance, where the cut-off point is (i.e. the point up to which a language proceeds in the hierarchy) for a particular language. Thus, in the case of Subject assignment, implicational hierarchies characterise which constituent or constituents can possibly be assigned Subject function in natural languages. The second aspect to hierarchies is that they may be applied to the description of an individual language with regard to a particular grammatical operation, indicating the different degrees of accessibility of the constituents of a predication and showing language-internal frequency distributions.

It is within this second, more specific, descriptive interpretation that hierarchies have been studied in this paper, by analysing a group of priority hierarchies which have been proposed as relevant to Subject selection in English: the Definiteness Hierarchy (definite >...

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