Re: semantic roles

That's an excellent paper.  Unfortunately, if he had looked at
anything Charles Fillmore had written in the last two decades, as
opposed to the famous stuff he wrote in the early 70s, he would have
realized that Fillmore along with a number of other linguists are
already pursuing exactly the sort of thing he is talking about, and
have elaborated in far greater detail and subtlety the way things like
figure-ground structure work in grammar (figure-ground and
trajector-landmark relations are absolutely fundamental, for example,
to Ronald Langacker's work on Cognitive Grammar, which was originally
called Space Grammar, but was changed at the suggestion of George
Lakoff for purely marketing reasons).

Ed Heil ------ edheil@postmark.net
--- http://purl.org/net/edheil ---

Charles wrote:

> > please explain semantic roles.  I have a vague idea,
> > but I have a hard time picking out different roles in sentences.
>
> Explain WHAT? the roles. (patient/accusative)
> Explain to WHOM? the explain-ee. (dative/indirect object)
> WHO explains? the explain-er. (nominative/subject/ergative)
>
> Many linguists seem to agree (!) there are 3 core roles.
> I like this explanation best, though it is weird:
> http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/papers/sky.html
> Read section 4 if you dare ...
>