Re: Core case roles

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

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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