Abstract
The semantic role Patient is poorly defined in the literature, so often one has to work with vague, nonoperational definitions. In this chapter it is shown that defining the Patient as the “entity that undergoes a change of state” accounts for part of the cases usually so analyzed; but in many cases this definition fails to work, and besides such cases cannot be brought under any single definition. For these cases, the solution here proposed is to leave the complements blank for semantic roles, and let them be filled in by default; the examination of many examples shows that this solution works adequately to account for the data. Finally, it is shown that the definition must be refined into the “entity that undergoes a nonpsychological change of state” because psychological change of state corresponds to another well-defined role, namely, the Experiencer.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
ADESSE (entry PASAR I) gives, for the sentence pasa su propia mano sobre su mejilla “(he) passes his own hand on his cheek,” an object Theme (móvil) and the prepositional phrase Path (trayecto). I return to this example below, suggesting that ADESSE’s may be the best analysis for this case.
- 3.
This of course does not exhaust the meaning conveyed by the sentence, but focuses on our particular cut of it.
- 4.
I call a nonsubject NP the object, for short.
- 5.
They are not always easy to delimit, but that is another problem.
- 6.
For present purposes, we may understand “theta roles” as equivalent to “semantic roles”.
- 7.
The converse situation, an ETR without an overt complement, is acceptable, and results in schematic filling-in, as seen in Sect. 7.6.4.
- 8.
The assignment requirement predicts the unacceptability of ∗Jim ate the pizza the sandwich: with eat, the system provides no way to assign roles to both nonsubject NPs, so one of them remains role-less, which is not allowed.
- 9.
They actually correspond to Langacker’s (1991) “pre-linguistic conceptions grounded in everyday experience.”
- 10.
Of course, they must appear in a complete symbolic analysis of the sentence, but here we are concerned only with the diathesis underlying sentence [6].
- 11.
- 12.
There are apparently a few exceptions, like deflorar “deflower,” but these seem to be very rare.
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Perini, M.A. (2019). What Is a Patient?. In: Thematic Relations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28538-8_11
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