Grammatical and semantic relations in Hausa

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The present study examines a distinct language structure built around categories that have been ignored until recently by linguistic theories. One of these is the category 'point of view' of the subject. The other category is 'goal', coding the presence of the goal of the predicate. This study demonstrates that the two categories play a fundamental role in the grammar of Hausa, a West Chadic language. They determine the way arguments are coded, the form of the predicate, the semantic interpretation of the clause, and the interpretation of the semantic roles of the noun phrases occurring in the clause. The presence of the first categories has created the motivation of yet another catogory, the coding of the presence of the affected object. This study demonstrates that, in some languages the coding of the point of view takes precedence of the coding of grammatical or semantic relations. The implication of this study is that structures of various languages may be organized around different functional domains having different hierarchical structures.