Argument selectors: A new perspective on grammatical relations An introduction

This article opens a volume of detailed descriptions of grammatical relations in thirteen languages. It begins by outlining new developments in the research on grammatical relations in the recent years. It then introduces the framework for studying and describing grammatical relations developed in Bickel (2010b) and Witzlack-Makarevich (2011). This framework served as a guideline to the contributors of the present volume in preparing individual accounts. I first present the various properties of arguments, which are understood as compound categories made up of both generalized semantic roles S, A, P, T, and G, as well as of their lexical and referential specifications. I then proceed to various conditions on grammatical relations and, finally, introduce the concept of argument selectors and illustrate their common types with examples from the languages of the present volume, as well as from other languages.