Dependency Grammar - Syntactic Functions

Syntactic Functions

Traditionally, DGs have treated the syntactic functions (= grammatical functions, grammatical relations) as primitive. They posit an inventory of functions (e.g. subject, object, oblique, determiner, attribute, predicative, etc.). These functions can appear as labels on the dependencies in the tree structures, e.g.

The syntactic functions in this tree are shown in green: ATTR (attribute), COMP-P (complement of preposition), COMP-TO (complement of to), DET (determiner), P-ATTR (prepositional attribute), PRED (predicative), SUBJ (subject), TO-COMP (to complement). The functions chosen and abbreviations used in the tree here are merely representative of the general stance of DGs toward the syntactic functions. The actual inventory of functions and designations employed vary from DG to DG.

As a primitive of the theory, the status of these functions is much different than in some constituency grammars. Traditionally, constituency grammars derive the syntactic functions from the constellation. For instance, the object is identified as the NP appearing inside finite VP, and the subject as the NP appearing outside of finite VP. Since DGs reject the existence of a finite VP constituent, they were never presented with the option to view the syntactic functions in this manner. The issue is a question of what comes first: traditionally, DGs take the syntactic functions to be primitive and they then derive the constellation from these functions, whereas constituency grammars traditionally take the constellation to be primitive and they then derive the syntactic functions from the constellation.

This question about what comes first (the functions or the constellation) is not an inflexible matter. The stances of both grammar types (dependency and constituency grammars) is not narrowly limited to the traditional views. Dependency and constituency are both fully compatible with both approaches to the syntactic functions. Indeed, monostratal systems, be they dependency- or constituency-based, will likely reject the notion that the functions are derived from the constellation or that the constellation is derived from the functions. They will take both to be primitive, which means neither can be derived from the other.