Grammatical Roles and Relations

Writing linguistic textbooks is not easy. Given that the intended audience is usually undergraduate students, you are supposed to start from the basics, you cannot assume any previous knowledge of the topics covered and you have to go to extreme lengths (literally) to make sure that the main ideas and issues are clear. All this does not mean that you can be divulgative, on the contrary, the use in university courses prevents you from using an informal, discursive style and requires you to explain all the necessary terminology and the (sometimes very technical) analyses proposed in the literature. In the field of linguistics, then, the textbook is supposed to do what in other disciplines is attained by at least four other books (or courses): explain the foundations and goals of the field, be a technical introduction to the discipline, be a reference book, where you can look up things you have forgotten, and finally also act as an intermediate course, which can enable you to go on to read the specialised literature on your own. Needless to say, the result is often a clumsy 600 pages monstrosity which manages to be dry, shallow, dispersive and incomplete at the same time. Trying to acquire a vast and technical discipline from such a book alone can be a very frustrating experience, as those of us who tried to teach themselves linguistics (or a subfield of it) by reading textbooks on their own know only too well. It is therefore all the more remarkable what professor emeritus Frank Palmer has achieved with this book. It provides a thorough and clear discussion of the notion of Grammatical Relation (such as Subject, Object etc.) and the much more difficult one of Grammatical Role (such as Agent, Patient, etc.), and uses them to analyse a wide variety of typologically different languages. This alone would have been a monumental achievement, but professor Palmer goes on to discuss how Grammatical Roles and Relations are matched in the world's languages, which means discussing vast and thorny topics like Case Systems, and to illustrate the mechanisms, such as the passive, that languages use to switch the identities between Role and Relation. To cover all this material with clarity and in less than 300 pages you have to be very sure of what you want to say, and professor Palmer certainly is, but even if he has his own theory about these topics, and argues it clearly and convincingly, he refrains from imposing it on recalcitrant data. On the contrary, he often quotes alternative analyses, showing the pros and cons of each one. This kind of theory neutral approach to such complicated issues could have produced a confusing and inconclusive comparison of badly summarised theories, but professor Palmer always manages to focus on the relevant issues and clearly show the different consequences of each approach. It is really impossible to understate the richness in ideas and data contained in this book: the reader will learn about fairly exotic languages (some of