30 Matthew P. Anstey
he writes, “In spite of differences in formulation and elaboration, many
semantic theorists agree in that the basic form of semantic representations
should look like the structure given.”
proppred arg 1 arg 2 arg 3GIVE JOHN MARY BO OKFigure 3. Dik’s first predicate frame
Dik also examines briefly the possible basis for universal semantic
categories. He rejects Chomsky’s ‘Innateness Hypothesis’ as a candidate
and prefers what he calls the ‘Means-End Hypothesis’ (presumably from
Jakobson 1963; see Dik 1967a) whereby language is an instrument of so-
cial interaction. The exploration of ‘communicative competence’^10 across
various cultures could hopefully lead to the positing of universal semantic
categories.
Dik (1975) provides the theoretical background to FG 1 ’s States of Af-
fairs typology. He adopts two criteria for distinguishing states of affairs:
dynamism and control. For the first time Dik introduces explicit semantic
functions into underlying structures, using the variable ‘M’ for ‘in the
manner of’. Thus he suggests that sentence (3) is “correctly expressed” as
(4):
(3) Annette dances beautifully.
(4) s1(dance(Annette))s1 and beautiful(Ms1)
In 1977 Dik delivered a paper on stepwise lexical decomposition (Dik
1977). The central idea is that meaning definitions of predicates are given
by a subset of simpler predicates from the lexicon of that same language
(cf. Faber and Mairal Usón 1999: 58–65).