The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy Reinterpreted: Subject Primacy or the Absolutive Hypothesis?

That is, all languages that have a relativizing strategy can relativize on subjects; all those which can relativize on direct objects can also relativize on subjects; all which can relativize on indirect objects can relativize on direct objects and subjects, and so on down the hierarchy (cf. Maxwell 1979, Comrie & Keenan 1979). Western Austronesian languages-including Tagalog, Toba Batak, and Malagasy-have been held up as evidence par excellence for this hierarchy, inasmuch as relativization is restricted to subjects in these languages.1 As support for the Accessibility Hierarchy, Keenan 1975 investigated the inherent 'naturalness' of subject relativization by examining the frequency of relative clauses along the hierarchy in a variety of written English texts. He found, indeed, that subject relatives were more common than direct object relatives, which were more common than obliques, etc. In addition he found that the ratio of subject to object relatives was correlated with the complexity of the text; a higher ratio (greater difference) was displayed in more simple texts, and a lower ratio (smaller difference) in more complex texts. Thuseven in a language like English, which grammatically allows relativization of all points along the scale-the Accessibility Hierarchy manifests itself statistically.2