Lecture 17

Ling 442

Exercises1. What is the difference between (a) and (b) regarding the

thematic roles of the subject DPs.(a) Bill ran.(b) The tree fell over.

2. Suppose that (c) is true. Suppose that (d) is also true, does our theory say that (d) is true or false?c) Mary spent 40,000 dollars in 2011.(d) Mary bought a cup of coffee on August 13, 2011.(e) (When she bought a cup of coffee on 8/13/11,) Mary was spending 40,000 dollars.

Exercises part 2

3. What is the sequence-of-tense phenomenon? How is English and Japanese different wrt to this?

(f) Mary found out (or thought) that Sue was pregnant.

4. (Advanced) Why couldn’t we say simply that the embedded past tense is an indexical (deictic) past tense that refers to a past time in relation to the utterance time?

Problems with Thematic Roles

• It is often difficult to identify the role of some DPs. Often the roles go beyond what the standard labels (e.g. agent, patient, theme, instrument, etc.) can cover.

• If we increase the number of thematic roles used in the theory, we cannot come up with an interesting theory because there are too many roles.

Localist roles

Some verbs just talk about locations of objects.Theme: object that changes location or undergoes a change.

1. The ball rolled out of the bag. [theme] [source]

2. The ball rolled into the pocket. [theme] [goal]3. Jones ran along the cinder path.

[theme] [path]

Recipient and benefactive

• With ditransitive verbs (i.e. double object constructions), the two objects are associated with the roles “theme” and “recipient/benefactive”

1.Liam showed the photos to his girlfriend.2.Jones made a new kennel for the dog.

Roles for adjunct DPs

1. With a silver spoon [instrument]2. On Sunday [time (frame)]2. In Seattle [location]

What does semantics mean to non-linguists?

What does semantics mean to non-linguists?

Theta roles

• Syntacticians often avoid this problem by saying that each verb has a fixed number of “theta roles” to assign/check. But we do not ask what specific roles are being assigned. E.g. When A writes B, A has the writer role, and B has the writee role.

Thematic roles and Vendler’s stuffAccomplishment: subject agent (usually)object incremental theme (e.g. write a book)Achievement: subject more like“experiencer” than “agent” (e.g. find, spot)object (if any) goal? (e.g. reach the summit)Activity: Subject agentobject (if any) patient (non-incremental)State: Subject non-agent, non-patientobject (if any) non-agent, non-patient

Lexical Decomposition

One way of showing the roles of each DP without using thematic roles, per se.

• Stative: represented by primitive predicates describing states

• Achievements: represented by BECOME DP Adj (DP’s “becoming” Adj)(The subject DP: undergoer?)

• Accomplishment: represented by DP CAUSE S (or S1 CAUSE S2) (DP “causes” S or S1 “causes” S2) (The subject DP: agent?)

Lexical decomposition and thematic roles

• Some examples• Recipient role: y in BECOME [have (y, z)]• Source: z in BECOME [~be-at (y, z)]• Goal: z in BECOME [be-at (y, z)]

Another possibility• Dowty (1991) tries to derive thematic roles (such as

agent/patient) in terms of a set of entailments that loosely characterize “prototypical subject/object”

• E.g. agent • Volitional involvement• Causing an event or change of state in another

participant• Movement

This means that the “agentive subject” of a particular transitive verb may not have all the properties listed here, but most of them.

Yet another possibility

• Just accept the standard thematic role labels and think of them semantically as relations between events and event participants.

• This analysis is discussed in conjunction with the neo-Davidsonian theory.

• How about selling vs. buying?