Re: Verbs and More Verbs

En réponse à Joe Hill <joe@...>:

>
> > Hello,
> >
> > First things first:   In the sentence "John exited the building,"
> what
> > semantic role does "John" play?   Is he an agent?   Is he an
> experiencer?
> > If he's something else, what's the name of that role?
>
> John is the Subject.
>
"Subject" is no semantic role! It's a syntactic, or grammatical role. It just
refers to the form taken by it. a semantic role refers to its deep function,
the meaning of the function in this particular sentence.

To explain you the difference, let's take those two examples:
- John reads the book.
- The book is read by John.

In the first sentence, the subject is John. In the second, the subject is "the
book". Yet the semantics of the subject is extremely different in those two
sentences! In the first one, the subject "John" is the one who accomplishes the
action, thus the agent, while in the second sentence, the subject "the book"
doesn't accomplish anything. On the contrary, it is the one which suffers the
action, thus it is the patient. It has the same semantic role as the object of
the first sentence, though subject and object are opposite syntactic roles. And
in the second sentence, the semantic agent is syntactically an oblique
complement introduced by a preposition.

In short, syntactic roles like "subject" and "object" are not to be confused
with semantic roles like "agent" and "patient". In fact, depending on the
language and the forms themselves, a semantic role can be represented by many
different syntactic roles (the two sentences were a good example of how
differently could semantic roles be represented syntactically).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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