Re: Theta Role Question

Hi all,

On Mon, 17 Jul 2006, David J. Peterson wrote:
> Carsten wrote:
> <<
> How should this construction be analyzed? I would translate
> this sentence as
>   Tingr¨¡ng dikunang  iyaena.
>   Music.A  passion.A 3s.m.GEN
>
> Into Ayeri, although I do not feel well with marking both
> NPs as Agents. Actually, I think, there is no agent, and
> both nouns should be best left unmarked, but that seems odd
> as well.
>  >>
>
> I don't think I quite understand the question.  How should
> "Music is his passion" be analyzed in English?  According to
> which theory?  And then, what would that have to do with
> Ayeri?
>
> In English, "Music is his passion" wouldn't be very different
> from "Jimmy is a boy".  If you wanted to treat both of these
> sentences the same way in Ayeri, then presumably the cases
> you assign to "Jimmy" and "boy" would be the same as for
> "music" and "his passion".  If you wanted to treat both of
> these sentences differently, though, then...treat them differently.  :)
> Semantically, it doesn't appear that there's any agent in any
> of these sentences--that is, neither music, passion, the boy or
> Jimmy is actively doing anything.  In both sentences, the
> second part is a kind of description of the first (or perhaps
> some added information about the first).  The difference is
> that being a boy is an inherent part of Jimmy; being someone's
> passion is not an inherent part of music.  So if there were to
> be a difference to latch onto, that might be it (or one of
> them).

David:  I beg to differ. ;-)

"Jimmy is a boy" - SVO, order unmarked
"Music is his passion" - OVS, order marked, O fronted for emphasis
< "His passion is music" - SVO, order unmarked

In each case in (what I have analysed as) the unmarked order, the
O is attributed to the S by the copula V "is".  In doing so, it's better
to think of "is" not as expressing an equality of S and O, but rather
the inclusion of O in the set of attributes of S.

To verify this, let's consider adding to our corpus the 2 sentences:
"Jimmy is a 10-year-old" and
"Hot cars is his other passion"

Neither of these logically conflicts with the earlier two sentences;
each adds attributes for the original subjects.  So we can take
them as reasonable evidence for saying:
"Jimmy is a 10-year-old boy" and
"You'll often find him driving hot cars while playing loud rock music".

(Hopefully "he" is not the same "Jimmy".)

It is clear that we can go on adding further attributes to the
subjects of these sentences, providing they don't contradict what
we already know about them, without ever really exhausting the
potential of that subject.  The subject is more than the attributes.

Carsten:  I don't see that these sentences - which are attributive
assertions - can benefit at all by having any of their constituents
forced into theta rôles that don't figure in attributions.  They
have no Agent, just as they have no Patient.

Regards,
Yahya

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