Re: THEORY: more questions
| From: | Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, November 26, 2003, 18:15 |
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On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 11:58:38AM -0500, Matt Trinsic wrote:
> >I was confusing PO with IO and SO with DO, or the other way around.
> Hello,
> I can understand DO/O as meaning Direct and Indirect objects, but what
> does PO/SO stand for?
Good question. I had assumed P and S stood for Patient and Subject or
some such, but I don't know what PO and SO are. Nor do I know how
indirect objects fit into syntactic analysis.
To avoid inconsistent use of terms like "subject" and "direct object"
which have different semantics in different languages, linguists
have a set of purely-syntactic(*) terms for the "arguments" or
"parameters" of a verb. The single argument of an intransitive
verb (which we consider the subject in English) is called S; the
argument of a transitive verb which we also call the subject is
A (for Agent), while the argument we call the direct object is
P (for patient). But like I said, I don't know where indirect objects
fit in.
-Mark
(*) modulo my earlier assertion that semantics is just deep syntax, this
just means that the terms refer to an analysis closer to the surface
of the text.
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