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Subcategorization and syntax-based theta-role assignment

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Abstract

Classic problems of how to generalize over predicate-argument relations (e.g., buy vs. sell; spray paint vs. spray a wall) have led to postulating semantic representations which are structured differently than deep syntax, such as (linked) theta grids and (lexical) conceptual structures. I argue that such autonomous semantics massively violates parsimony, and that theta-roles are better predicted by using only modestly enhanced, independently justified deep structures. In addition, I claim that several recent generalizations (of Rizzi, Levin and Rappaport, and Randall) are better formulated as deep syntactic properties than in terms of theta-roles.

This syntactic approach to predicate-argument relations thus reinitiates a line of research implicit in Chomsky's Aspects but never developed. The first section argues that only this approach faithfully applies the syntactic revolution to lexical (head-complement) semantics.

Principles invoked include Chomsky's Full Interpretation and Rule for Agents and Talmy's Figure/Ground separation, along with a new Ground Specification and syntactic counterparts to two formal devices from Jackendoff's Conceptual Structures. The thematic role constellations for many verb classes (mostly but not all from English) are shown to follow from these principles. The conclusion speculates that the theta-roles assigned to a sentence are not its properties at a linguistic level, but rather indicate how that sentence is to modify cognitive representations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics GN-40, University of Washington, 98195, Seattle, WA, U.S.A.

    Joseph E. Emonds

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I am grateful to Wendy Wilkins and Rastko Močnik for encouragement of this work and for organizing fora where it was discussed: respectively the 1985 Winter LSA Symposium on Theta Roles and the 1987 Conference on the Formation of Culture in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. My intellectual debts obvious here throughout are to the pioneering works of Noam Chomsky and Ray Jackendoff. I am indebted to them both as well as to Carol Georgopoulos, Yuki Kuroda and a referee for careful critical readings, and regret that length has prohibited pursuing every comment that merited consideration. I also remain appreciative of the feedback from my fall 1986 seminar at the University of Washington, and especially of the stern critiques of Koichi Takezawa. Funally, my sincere thanks go to Jan M. Griffith of Word-wright, Seattle, who has efficiently prepared many versions of this work.

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Emonds, J.E. Subcategorization and syntax-based theta-role assignment. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 9, 369–429 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00135353

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