ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book treats aspects of the syntax of Halkomelem, a Salish language spoken in southwestern British Columbia. Among the grammatical relations (GRs) used in Relational Grammar (RG) are: predicate (P), subject (1), object (2), indirect object (3), Oblique and chomeur (Cho). The data on which the book is based are from my fieldwork with speakers on Vancouver Island and from the area of Vancouver, BC David Perlmutter and Postal have proposed a number of laws stated in terms of grammatical relations. Linguistic theory can be conceived of as the task of characterizing the set of well-formed relational networks (RNs) for natural languages. The task of grammars of individual languages is to state which subset of the set of well-formed RNs is well-formed in that language.
