128 ROBERT D. VAN VALIN, JR.
(118) Linking from Syntactic Structure to Logical Structure (Revised)
- Ascertain the voice of a transitive verb:
a. If it is active, the pivot is an actor.
b. If it is passive, the pivot is an undergoer; the actor may
appear in the periphery marked by an adposition or an
oblique case, in English by. - Retrieve the LS of the predicate in the nucleus from the lex
icon and with respect to it execute steps (1) and (2) from
(115) above, subject to the following proviso:
a. When there is more than one choice for the undergoer,
execute steps (b) and (c) below instead of assigning under-
goerhood.
b. With respect to the LS, execute step (1) from (115) and
determine actor only.
c. With respect to the sentence being analyzed, determine
the semantic roles of the non-macrorole core arguments
from their case marking/adposition; if the non-macrorole
core argument is marked by a locative adposition, link it
with the first argument position in the state predicate in
the LS; otherwise, link it to the second argument position. - Link actor with actor, undergoer with undergoer, remaining
semantic role(s) with remaining semantic role(s). - In a non-subordinate core juncture, the theory of control
determines which core argument of the matrix core is
associated with the unlinked argument position in the
embedded LS. - If there is an element in the PCS,
a. Link all of the non-PCS arguments first;
b. Assign it the remaining unlinked argument position in the
LS.
The linking from (113a) to (114a) may be represented as in Figure 42; the
numbers refer to the steps in (118). There is no step 1 with respect to
intransitive verbs, since there is no voice opposition with them. Because
there is no morphosyntactic marker of the macrorole of the pivot of the
main clause, it cannot be interpreted as either actor or undergoer; rather, it
can be specified only as a macrorole, since it is a direct NP. Each core is
linked independently to its respective LS until step 4; since there is no pivot