Is the subject always the doer of the action?

No. The subject is a grammatical relation, not a semantic role. In 'The window broke' or 'Mary was praised', the subject is not the agent, which shows that grammatical relations and thematic roles are distinct.

What is the difference between case and agreement?

Case marks the grammatical relation on the noun phrase itself, as with Latin nominative and accusative endings, whereas agreement marks features of an argument (such as person and number) on another element, typically the verb.

Grammatical Relations and Case

Grammatical relations such as subject and object, the case marking and agreement that signal them, and the thematic roles that underlie them together structure how arguments relate to predicates.

Definition

Grammatical relations are the syntactic functions that arguments bear to a predicate, such as subject and object; case and agreement are the morphological systems that mark them, and thematic roles are the semantic relations from which they are partly derived.

Scope

This area covers the relational organisation of the clause: the grammatical relations of subject and object, the morphological systems of case and agreement that encode them, the thematic (semantic) roles arguments bear, and the alignment systems (notably nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive) by which languages group these relations. It does not cover phrase structure or particular syntactic frameworks, which are treated in neighbouring areas.

Sub-topics

Core questions

What are grammatical relations such as subject and object, and how are they identified?
How do case and agreement mark grammatical relations on words?
What semantic (thematic) roles do arguments bear, and how do they map onto grammatical relations?
How do languages differ in aligning the relations of intransitive and transitive clauses?

Key concepts

subject and object
grammatical relation
case marking
agreement
thematic role
alignment
ergativity

Key theories

Alignment typology: The classification of languages by how they group the sole argument of an intransitive verb with the agent or patient of a transitive verb, yielding nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive, and other systems.
Case as the morphological marking of relations: The view, surveyed by Blake, that case systems encode grammatical and semantic relations on nominals, with abstract Case in generative theory licensing noun phrases independently of overt marking.

History

Grammatical relations were foregrounded by Relational Grammar in the 1970s, which took subject and object as primitives. Typological work by Comrie (1989) and Dixon (1994) revealed the diversity of alignment systems, including ergativity, challenging assumptions built on accusative languages. Blake (2001) synthesised the study of case, while generative theory developed abstract Case as a licensing condition on noun phrases.

Debates

Are grammatical relations primitive or derived?: Whether subject and object are basic syntactic primitives, as in Relational and Lexical-Functional Grammar, or derived from structural configurations, as in phrase-structure-based theories.
The status of ergativity: Whether ergative alignment is a deep organisational property of a language or a surface marking pattern, and how it interacts with split systems sensitive to tense, aspect, or person.

Key figures

R. M. W. Dixon
Barry J. Blake
Bernard Comrie
Andrew Carnie

Seminal works

comrie1989
dixon1994
blake2001

Frequently asked questions

Is the subject always the doer of the action?: No. The subject is a grammatical relation, not a semantic role. In 'The window broke' or 'Mary was praised', the subject is not the agent, which shows that grammatical relations and thematic roles are distinct.
What is the difference between case and agreement?: Case marks the grammatical relation on the noun phrase itself, as with Latin nominative and accusative endings, whereas agreement marks features of an argument (such as person and number) on another element, typically the verb.