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I know, that there is a relation between part of sentence and part of speech, namely elements from parts of speech can be combined following certain rules in order to be used as a part of sentence within a sentence. A word is a member of a part of speech alone for being this word, but a combination of parts of speech can be used as different parts of sentence according to the role they play within the sentence.

My question is, is there a set of parts of sentence that is the same set for every language?

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  • Is your question about parts of speech or about parts of sentence?
    – Yellow Sky
    Nov 2, 2014 at 17:22
  • it is about part of sentences, i did not notice the mismatch when i typed.
    – meireikei
    Nov 2, 2014 at 17:23
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    Can you provide a link that defines 'part of sentence' as you're using it?
    – curiousdannii
    Nov 3, 2014 at 1:02

2 Answers 2

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The answer is no. Some languages, namely the ergative languages, don't have such parts of sentence as subject and object which are typical for most European languages. Instead, they have agent and patient which don't directly correspond to subject and object.

For example, in the two English sentences "The man has arrived." and "The man saw the boy." the subject is "the man". If you translate these sentences into Basque, you'll get "Gizona etorri da." and "Gizonak mutila ikusi du." The first word, "gizon" (man) is marked with different cases in the two Basque sentences, in the firs one it is patient, in the second one it is agent, and the word "mutil" (boy) is the patient in the second sentence, it is marked with the absolute case ending -a, just the same way as the word "gizon" (man) in the first sentence.

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  • and those patient and agent themselves are also part of sentences , right?
    – meireikei
    Nov 2, 2014 at 17:51
  • Naturally they are, if they weren't, I wouldn't have written about them.
    – Yellow Sky
    Nov 2, 2014 at 17:54
  • well, i did not question your competence, rather i wanted to be very sure , therefore the ",right?".
    – meireikei
    Nov 2, 2014 at 17:55
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    Patient and agent are not so much parts of sentences as parts of frames. Human Action frames, for instance, include slots for Agent and Patient, as well as other roles. But they can show up as subjects or objects or indirect objects or objects of prepositions in various kinds of sentence. @YellowSky is correct that ergative languages don't have a category Subject (although split ergative languages do); if you're looking for semantic universals, start with logic: propositions, predicates, and arguments.
    – jlawler
    Dec 2, 2014 at 18:57
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    I don't know why you'd say that ergative languages don't have subjects and objects. Often their subjects are called agents, but that's just to reduce confusion when comparing them with nominative languages. The wikipedia page you linked to says that ergative languages still have objects! I think this answer just confuses matters rather than helps.
    – curiousdannii
    Dec 4, 2014 at 11:09
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You have to first define what a "part of sentence" is. Your question seems to take part-of-sentence to have to do with combining individual words into constituents, but then you also indicate that part-of-sentence is in part defined by functional role. So an NP would be a part-of-sentence, and a subject, or an agent, or a topic, would be a part-of-sentence. Mixing together all of these notions will naturally lead to incoherence.

Constituent properties have a decent chance for existential universality (that is, there are some that are universal), such as "NP", "Sentence". However, not every theory uses the same labeling (so N" is distinct from NP, and some branches of Minimalism don't bother with labeling which they consider to be epiphenomenal). So you would first have to specify what theory of constituency you assume, if you care about the constituency version of part-of-sentence. (And I suspect that you don't).

The subset of semantic relations that would appear to be parts-of-sentence are probably universal, in that every language has the means of distinguishing such roles (i.e. there are no languages which are incapable of expressing the fact that X is an agent vs. X is a theme; all languages can express the conjunction of two referents). Languages differ wildly in how that distinction is encoded, e.g. by affixation or some kind, by word order, by differential government of agreement, by concatenation with distinct function-marking words.

Questions about grammatical relationship (like subject, direct object) can only be answered in the context of a theory of grammatical relationships. Ergativity is an infamous case of that problem, since one theory might take the surface pattern of affixation or word order to be the primary diagnostic while another would say that an ergative language is nothing more than one where passive is obligatory. And there are theories where relations like "subject", "object" aren't required.

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