✏Grammatical Functions ✏
Is the syntactic role played by a word or phrase in the context of a particular clause or sentence.
Several tests can be used
to determine grammatical function, as we show here:
1.Subjects
A subject is a part of a sentence that contains the person or thing performing the action (or verb) in a sentence
These two sentences have exactly the same words and have the same predicator devoured
2. Agreement
The main verb of a sentence agrees with the subject in English:
The man walked to his car.
In this example, "man" is a singular, male noun, so "his" is the appropriate pronoun to replace the noun
3.Tag questions
A tag question, a short question tagged onto the end of an utterance, is also a
reliable subjecthood test
Example: 1.The lady singing with a boy is a genius, isn’t she/*isn’t he?
5.Direct and Indirect Objects
4.Subject-auxiliary inversion
In forming questions and other sentence-types.
A direct object (DO) is canonically an NP, undergoing the process denoted by the verb.
Examples:
This teacher is a genius.
The kids have arrived safely.
6.Predicative Complements
[An indirect object (IO) is one which precedes a direct object (DO), as in (20); IOs are NPs
and have the semantic roles of goal, recipient, or benefactive]
There also are NPs which follow a verb but which do not behave as DOs or IOs
7.Oblique Complements
8.Modifiers
Their presence is obligatory, for syntactic well-formedness, they are called oblique complements.
The functions of DO, IO, predicative complement, and oblique complement all have one common property
9.Form and Function Together
Grammatical form is concerned with the description of linguistic units in terms of what they are, and grammatical function is concerned with the description of what these linguistic units do.