|
|
THEMATIC ROLES AND ARGUMENT OBLIQUE ALTERNATIONS
John Beavers
Stanford University
Tuesday, March 1, noon, MJH Room 126
Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center/Mellon Foundation
Graduate Research Program
In this talk I examine the semantic underpinnings of argument realization, using argument/oblique alternations as a case
study, where a single participant can be realized either as a direct argument or an oblique with respect to a particular verb
(e.g. English "John loaded the wagon with hay/John loaded hay onto the wagon"). Drawing on data from a variety of languages,
I argue that such alternations are universally governed by the relative informativity of different realization options:
direct argument realizations are associated with more entailments about their role in the event than their alternant oblique
realizations, where the exact contrasts are verb specific but cluster into broader semantic categories. Much recent work in
predicate decompositions fails to provide a uniform characterization of this general contrast. I argue that it is instead
best characterized in a theory of argument realization that takes verb-specific "lexical entailments" as its basis. To this
end I sketch a framework for analyzing argument/oblique alternations in terms of Dowty (1989, 1991), where thematic roles are
defined as sets of entailments and the relative informativity of alternating realizations in terms of subset relationships
between thematic roles. This works serves to (a) provide a general characterization for argument/oblique alternations, (b)
update the proto-role approach of Dowty (1991) to include a theory of oblique realization and (c) support a general theory of
argument realization based directly on verb-specific semantic contrasts.
|
|
