Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

PREDICTING SYNTAX FROM SEMANTICS 513

gedenken is clearly based on denken "to think". The Greek form θυμάμαι
"to remember" is based on θυμός "mind; soul". Lakhota kiksuye "re­
member, be conscious" is composed of the prefix ki- "back again" (Boas &
Deloria 1941:88) + ksuya "to feel pain, be hurt"; here the again component
is explicit in the form of the verb.
A central feature of the semantic metalanguage we are developing is
what we may call semantic redundancy rules [SRR]. These rules explicate
how the decompositional elements work within the metalanguage, i.e. their
syntax, the generalizations that can be made about the nature of arguments
of the basic predicates in the metalanguage, the range of possible fillers
from which is generalized the semantic values the variable may have, entail­
ments of basic predicates, etc. All instances of think in decomposed seman­
tic structures, for instance, require a person (or an anthropomorphized
being) to be the thinker, and this need not be stated every time think
occurs; rather, it can be stated only once in the SRR. Furthermore, think,
which is a cognitive activity, has a cognitive state as a logical entailment and
this is to be decomposed in the SRR as have.in.mind, the necessarily con­
scious state corresponding to something.be.in.mind. Similarly, in order to
find exactly what set of items something.be.in.mind is generalized from,
one looks in the SRR and locates a representation like the following:
something.be.in.mind —

1. intention(s): something.x.intends.be.in.mind


2. knowledge: something.x.knows.be.in.mind


3. belief (s): something.x.believes.be.in.mind


4. perception(s): something.x.perceived.be.in.mind
   etc.
   Note that SRRs of this type provide details of the semantic representation
   of individual subclasses which can fill the variable slot and which are consis­
   tent with the definition of the predicate for which they are possible argu­
   ment fillers, e.g. remember. A verb like recall, which also has a some­
   thing.be.in mind component to its semantics, does not allow intentions as
   the y argument of the verb (i.e., you can not say *She recalled to lock the
   door) because this is incompatible with further elements in the decomposi­
   tion of this predicate. Recall entails that what one has brought into the
   mind is the memory of an actual thing or event from the past, not the mem­
   ory of a possible future intentional act (i.e., something.be.in.mind &
   this.thing.be/happen.in.the.past). In other words, remember and recall