Argument Selectors

Book excerpt: Capitalizing on the by now widely accepted idea of the construction-specific and language-specific nature of grammatical relations, the editors of the volume developed a modern framework for systematically capturing all sorts of variations in grammatical relations. The central concepts of this framework are the notions of argument role and its referential properties, argument selector, as well as various conditions on argument selections. The contributors of the volume applied this framework in their descriptions of grammatical relations in individual languages and discussed its limitations and advantages. This resulted in a coherent description of grammatical relations in thirteen genealogically and geographically diverse languages based on original and extensive fieldwork on under-described languages. The volume presents a far more detailed picture of the diversity of argument selectors and effects of predicates, referential properties of arguments, as well as of various clausal conditions on grammatical relations than previously published grammatical descriptions.