The emergence of grammatical relations
The domain examined in Chapter 13 can be broadly described as the domain of relationships between the predicate and noun phrases. The Chapter addresses a narrow but an important issue, viz. the emergence of a binary distinction between the grammatical relations subject and object. Unlike various theoretical approaches, generative and functional alike that take the dichotomy of subject and object to be basic components of clausal structure, the study demonstrates that in some languages this dichotomy is a product of functional changes that start from an initial state with undifferentiated relations, in which there is no distinction between the subject and object. In other languages the distinction between the subject and object is a product of the reduction of a rich system of coding semantic relations between the predicate and noun phrases.