2.3.2 Syntactic roles for noun phrases
We turn now to the syntactic functions of noun phrases. These are often known as GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS, because they define NPs in terms of their relationships with the verbs of which they are an argument. The two most important grammatical relations are SUBJECT and (DIRECT) OBJECT. he terms themselves have already been used several times, here to give you a working idea of what subjects and objects I aim are in English. Subjects typically have special properties that set them apart from the other grammatical relations, and Chapter 6 returns to the cross-linguistic properties of subjects and other grammatical relations.