Objects and the other subject: grammatical functions, functional categories and configurability

"Grammatical functions, readily identifiable informally in particular languages, have had an uncertain status in generative grammar. Despite Chomsky's assertion in Aspects that they are not theoretical primitives (a position vigorously challenged by a number of well-known theories), the role of functions such as subject and object has become increasingly prominent as Chomskyan linguistics has developed. As statements of principles and rules of grammar have grown to incorporate these notions, the position that grammatical functions are not primitives has come to merit scrutiny. The papers in this volume examine the current role of grammatical functions in transformational syntax in two ways: (i) through largely theoretical considerations of their status and (ii) through detailed analyses for a wide variety of languages. Taken together the chapters in this volume present a comprehensive view of how transformational syntax characterizes the elusive but often useful notions of subject and object, examining how subject and object properties are distributed among various functional projections, converging sometimes in particular languages."--Jacket