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Accessibility Hierarchy
Accessibility Hierarchy
In linguistics, Accessibility Hierarchy is a cross-linguistic property that relative clauses are more difficult to process in certain roles:
- Subject > Direct Object > Indirect Object > Oblique > Genitive > Object of comparative
The hierarchy was proposed by Keenan and Comrie (1977). Similar hierarchies have been proposed for Noun Phrases, Pronominal reflexes, etc. Here are some examples of the NP and relative clause usage from English:
| Subject | That’s the man [who ran away]. | The girl [who came late] is my sister. |
| Direct object | That’s the man [I saw yesterday]. | The girl [Kate saw] is my sister. |
| Indirect object | That’s the man [to whom I gave the letter]. | The girl [who I wrote a letter to] is my sister. |
| Oblique | That’s the man [I was talking about]. | The girl [who I sat next to] is my sister. |
| Genitive | That’s the man [whose sister I know]. | The girl [whose father died] told me she was sad. |
| Obj of Comp | That’s the man [I am taller than]. | The girl [who Kate is smarter than] is my sister. |
Modern grammars may use the accessibility hierarchy to order productions - e.g. in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar the hierarchy corresponds to the order of elements on the subcat list, and interacts with other principles in explanations of binding facts. The hierarchy also figures in Lexical Functional Grammar where it is known as Syntactic Rank or the Relational Hierarchy.
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Last updated on Wednesday June 11, 2008 at 19:21:04 PDT (GMT -0700)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Wednesday June 11, 2008 at 19:21:04 PDT (GMT -0700)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation
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