Re: Core case roles

In a message dated 8/12/02 8:57:41 AM, christophe.grandsire@FREE.FR writes:

>En réponse à John Cowan <jcowan@...>:
>
>>
>> There are counterexamples like "The stone broke the window", where
>> the grammatical subject is an instrument.
>
>Really? I'd take it to be an agent, since no other agent is stated here.
>After
>all, without context we don't whether somebody threw it. It could well
>be that
>we have a house at the bottom of a hill, and at the top of the hill there
>are a
>few stones. For unknown reasons (wind, rain, anything like that), a stone
>begins to roll, falls from the top of the hill through a window of the
>house.
>And you're not gonna say in this case that the weather was the agent here.
>
>I don't even understand why this sentence is a problem. We have a case
>where an
>inanimate object appears as agent. Not something rare in English. The fact
>that
>it would map better with an instrument in other sentences doesn't say
anything
>about its role in this particular sentence.
>
>  RM discusses this sentence
>> type briefly but dismisses it as too rare in the world's languages
>> to worry about.  Since his purposes are MT and IAL rather than
>> linguistic theory, fair enough.
>>
>
>I'd guess it's rare only because languages that allow inanimate agents
>are
>rare. But I'm pretty sure that all languages that allow inanimate agents
>allow
>this kind of construction. Correct me if I'm wrong of course, I'd like
>to be
>corrected from this view if it's an incorrect one :) .
>
>Christophe.
>
>http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
I think the problem is that an agent has to be *willing*. If a person, uh,
breaks, they're a patient. If they break themselves on purpose, they're an
agent and a patient. If they break a window on purpose, they're an agent, and
the window is the patient. If someone pushes them through a window in order
to break it, they're an instrument, while the person pushing them up is the
agent now. If you just take away the person pushing, I don't think the role
of the person falilng through and breaking the window should change - they're
still an instrument, affecting something against their own will, or at least
not because of it.

A stone should work the same way. If it breaks a window, is semantically in
the same role whether someone threw it or not. It is not automatically an
agent just because it's the subject (the two are independent - you can change
word order and phrasing, but the semantic roles stay the same - for example,
"the window broke from the stone"). It can never decide to break something
like a person can (though a given language/culture could see this
differently). Kar Marinam would treat the stone as an instrument in both
instances, and a speaker would probably say that there is an agent too, that
really caused the action, though we just don't know or want to say what it is
(maybe a spirit or something). Even if a language doesn't have that excuse,
it shouldn't matter - not every sentence has to have an agent. If I say, "I
sneezed," there's no agent expressed, and is there really a need for one?

Of course, someone can correct me if I'm wrong too.

Josh Roth
http://members.aol.com/fuscian/home.html

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