Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

224 MARK HANSELL

offered by the relation of thematic relations to syntactic roles as mediated

by the macroroles actor and undergoer in RRG. In mapping thematic rela­

tions onto macroroles, there is a markedness hierarchy ("Synopsis", section

3.3.2): for example, agent is the least marked choice for actor, patient the

least marked choice for undergoer, and locative less marked for actorhood

than theme. In Mandarin, where actor and undergoer typically correspond

to subject and object respectively (see LaPolla 1990 for detailed discus­

sion), a listener trying to make sense of a CC like (48b) or (49b) must

decide on the basis of the case role required by the V 2 whether it is the actor

or undergoer that is the argument of V 2. For example, V 2 in (48b) is a sta­

tive verb, its lone argument should be a patient. Since patient is the least

marked choice for undergoer, the natural interpretation is that the argu­

ment which is the undergoer of the entire construction, "shoes", is the argu­

ment of "bad". This is represented in Figure 1. Encoding proceeds upward

from logical structure to the layered structure of the clause, and interpreta­

tion goes downwards from the clause to logical structure. In terms of

interpretation, (3) to (2) is no problem, the subject is the actor and the

object is the undergoer. Relating (2) to (1) is no problem for Vl5 since with

"chew" effector corresponds to actor and locative corresponds to under­

goer. The macrorole status of the argument of V 2 is problematic however,

especially since both shoes and dogs can be "bad" (not to mention the fact

that dogs that chew up shoes are especially bad!). However, since the inher­

ent lexical properties of "bad" require the thematic relation patient for its

argument, and since the macrorole undergoer is the least marked choice for

Figure 1