Grammatical Function Change
In English we can say:
(7) The governor broke the law
We can also say:
(8) The law was broken by the governor
In grammatical terms, the sentence in (7) is active and the one in (8) is passive. The law, which undergoes the action of breaking, occupies object position in (7), but in (8) it occupies subject position. The agent, the governor, occupies subject position in (7), but in (8) it surfaces as the object of the preposition by. It would have been equally grammatical not to mention the governor at all, as in (9):
(9) The law was broken
There are times in life when the passive is convenient. Perhaps the governor’s administration needs to acknowledge that the law was broken but does not want to admit publicly that the governor was the one at fault.
In English we can also say:
(10) Solomon made the governor break the law
Here, the governor is still the agent of the verb break, but it is not the subject of the sentence as a whole. Solomon has taken over that function. Sentences like the one in (10) are called causative because they usually express the meaning ‘cause to do something’, or sometimes ‘allow, persuade, help to do something’.
In English we can also say:
(11) The governor broke the law for Smith
This sentence resembles the one in (7), but we have introduced another participant, Smith, the person for whom the governor broke the law.
We could discuss the morphology of break in the English sentences in (7–11), but its forms are fairly limited: broke, broken, break. None of these forms is limited to expressing a passive, causative, or ‘for X’ interpretation. (The -en of broken in (8–9) is sometimes considered a passive morpheme, but it is not limited to passive sentences. We could also say The governor has broken the law, which is active.) However, if we look at other languages, we often find that the passive, causative, and other types of grammatical-function-changing phenomena (we define the term grammatical function change immediately below) are associated with particular morphology. For example, we were introduced to the Kujamaat Jóola causative suffix in Derivation and Verbs in Kujamaat Jóola.
Grammatical function change refers to “alternations in the grammatical encoding of referential expressions,” to use the definition presented by Baker (1988: 1). In (7–8), for example, we saw that the agent can be encoded as a subject or object, depending on the form of the verb used: broke or was broken. Passive, causative, and other phenomena that we illustrate are grammatical-function changing phenomena because they can be seen as triggering the encoding change.
Our goal is to help you recognize various types of grammatical-function-changing phenomena that are found cross- linguistically. We do not analyze them, beyond presenting basic definitions, because to do so would require us to go too deeply into syntax. Grammatical-function-changing phenomena involve morphology-syntax interactions at their most intimate.
