Abstract
Prototypical associations of semantic roles with syntactic units and functions.
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Notes
- 1.
Taylor (1989) gives a survey of the theme, but much has been added in the years since his book was published.
- 2.
As in a polícia acabou com a festa ‘the police ended the party’, literally ‘with the party’.
- 3.
Jackendoff’s is the earliest formulation as a hierarchy, to my knowledge. But the association between subject and Agent (or “logical subject”) is ancient, and has been the source of endless confusion; see a brief survey of early positions in Jespersen (1924, pp. 145–150).
- 4.
The difference between Actor and Agent, if any, need not concern us here.
- 5.
The verb apanhar ‘to be spanked’ has a Patient subject, and an Agent of the form de+SN, although it does not show a passive morphology. I know of no verb in English that behaves like apanhar; in Latin there is uapulare: puer uapulauit (not *uapulatus est) ‘the boy was spanked’.
- 6.
These sentences may not be perfect synonyms, perhaps. But they are synonymous in what respects semantic roles and their distribution, that is, they have the same phrases in the same semantic roles: Bia is the Agent, Flávio the Patient in all three cases.
- 7.
This is no news, of course; the probabilistic nature of hierarchies is generally acknowledged.
- 8.
The symbol <> is to be read “is prototypically coded as”.
- 9.
The ordering, of course, is only abstract—it is a way to make the system work. It does not entail any commitment about the order in which such operations take place in real time in real brains.
- 10.
The result is also subject to filtering, as will be seen in Sect. 8.3.
- 11.
- 12.
See Wierzbicka (1996, pp. 119–120).
- 13.
Yet, as we will see, there are coding differences of the Experiencer with feeling verbs and with perception verbs, which may lead us to postulate two distinct semantic roles, although both will be defined in some way as relating to the mental state of an entity.
- 14.
In English, according to Levin (1993, p. 189 ff), most verbs like startle do not occur with Stimulus as a prepositional phrase.
- 15.
Márcia Cançado, personal communication.
- 16.
In writing, and for many speakers in speech as well, the reflexive, here se, is required.
- 17.
Adorar in its meaning of ‘worship’ is not a verb of feeling.
- 18.
Or VSubj Refl V com NP, for speakers who have a reflexive in these cases: o cachorro se assustou com o trovão (ex. [15] above).
- 19.
The role Possessor belongs to a constituent of the NP meu pé ‘my foot’, and does not appear in the analysis of the sentence.
- 20.
De marks the Goal only with the verb aproximar ‘come near’.
- 21.
Sobre in the meaning of ‘on’ is not used in modern Brazilian Portuguese.
- 22.
These are only approximate translations. The distinction between para and por is a traditional nightmare for English speakers learning Portuguese.
- 23.
That is, both NPs have the semantic role αRef.
- 24.
To borrow a very illustrative example from Castelfranchi and Parisi (1980), it is this kind of filtering that allows us to know that Jim cooked the eggs in the kitchen tells us that Jim was in the kitchen, but Jim cooked the eggs in his brand-new frying pan does not tell us that Jim was in the frying pan.
- 25.
Or a janela se abriu, for many speakers.
- 26.
More rigorously, the VSubj (as defined in Sect. 1.3.3) is always present.
- 27.
From the narration of a soccer match on TV.
- 28.
This sentence is acceptable if the NP is strongly stressed, meaning something like “yes, white kangaroos do exist!”.
- 29.
I tend to believe that one functions for production, the other for reception, but this is not necessarily relevant for language description, which focuses on competence. Reliability varies: a survey of 232 diatheses occurring in the Dictionary shows that the rule VSubj<> Agent works in 52.1 % of the cases, and the rule Agent <>VSubj works in 96.7 % of the cases (i.e., with only four exceptions).
- 30.
Thus answering, for this particular area, the criticism of several authors that linguistic description fails to be exhaustive, even in intention (cf. for example, Gross 1975, p. 20).
- 31.
Perhaps more than two, but let us take just two for simplicity.
- 32.
See Levin and Hovav’s (2005, p. 170–175) for a survey.
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Perini, M.A. (2015). Hierarchies and Human Subjects. In: Describing Verb Valency. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20985-2_8
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