Re: Core case roles

On Mon, 12 Aug 2002 14:57:19 +0200
Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:

> 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.
Actually, it can't be an agent. You can't say :

(i)* The stone deliberately broke the window.

But your remark is true, and the corresponding semantic case (for inanimate) is Force.


>   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.
Actually Agent/Force are often regarded as the highest cases on the semantic scale, and
thus they often appear in the first argument position and/or in Subject
position.
But in
(ii) The stone [Instr] broke the window
the agent is implicit. At a rough underlying level, it would be [PAST break(X, the
window)(the stone)], where <the stone> raises in Subject position. As a
consequence, it looses its case marker (here a preposition).

This kind of construction is very common in human languages (and maybe in conlangs
too ;)), and can also occur with the object (I can give you an example in
French if you're interested, and I'm still looking for other ones), but it's
not especially related to the Agent (and Force). A good example is :
(iii) This car sits four.
This sounds strange to me, but an english native speaker told me it was correct.
(== 'you can sit 4 in this car' or something like that). Here <this car> is a
locative promoted as a subject !


Julien

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