Abstract
An introduction to the problem of defining and delimiting semantic roles. Their importance in the definition of diatheses. Constructions as descriptive tools.
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Notes
- 1.
Or other governing words, as is well known. Here I limit the exposition to examples with a governing verb. In fact, the relation is with the cognitive “mental landscape” evoked by the sentence, but for our purposes it is adequate to speak of relation with the verb.
- 2.
No is the agglutination of the preposition em + the article o.
- 3.
They are basically synonymous; the difference in meaning is only that espancar seems to involve more violence than bater (cf. English hit vs. spank).
- 4.
Or notional vs. relational items, or, in an older terminology, semantemes vs. morphemes.
- 5.
Grammatical semantics includes other factors, such as word order, affixes, and intonational contours.
- 6.
The notion of core semantic relation (as opposed to peripheral semantic relation) is developed in Chap. 5.
- 7.
To use Rumelhart and Ortony’s (1976) terms.
- 8.
In this passage, Levin and Hovav refer only to the sentence; within other types of constituent a nominal, an adverb, etc. can be the determining element—for instance, in an NP the nominal head determines the semantic roles of the other constituents.
- 9.
- 10.
The mental landscape is what Castelfranchi and Parisi (1980) call rete di conoscenze ‘net of knowledge’. I do not use their term because it suggests reference to permanent knowledge in semantic memory, but here we deal with the interpretation of an individual utterance, and the mental landscape is stored only as part of the understanding of the current text. That is, each utterance calls for the construction of a new mental landscape. It is also sometimes called the cognitive map.
- 11.
Without disregarding the serious methodological problems involved. Of course, not all linguists agree as to the possibility, and need, for the use of introspective data—Sampson (2001, pp. 2–5) illustrates a dissenting view. I beg to differ; see discussion in Perini and Othero (2011). See also Talmy’s (2007) very interesting discussion on the use of introspection in linguistic analysis.
- 12.
- 13.
In the VVP list, which considers only diatheses (not all sentential constructions in the language), there are 256 as of February, 2015.
- 14.
- 15.
In the present analysis there is no need to distinguish objects from objoids. I only distinguish subjects from other NPs, the latter being sometimes referred to as objects, which is a convenient term to avoid using the more cumbersome nonsubject NP.
- 16.
Several of these semantic roles are poorly defined at present; here it is enough to note the great variety of semantic relations expressible by the syntactic structure VSubj V NP.
- 17.
A better term might be signic, to keep the connection with the sign, but the term symbolic is in general use, and will be used here.
- 18.
Which Goldberg greatly elaborates later in her book.
- 19.
In particular, I see no point in distinguishing the arguments by numbers (A1, A3), since they are already distinguished by their semantic roles.
- 20.
The use of em to mark the Goal is condemned by traditional grammarians. Here, as elsewhere, people pay them no attention.
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Perini, M.A. (2015). Semantic Roles in Grammatical Description. In: Describing Verb Valency. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20985-2_3
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