Theoretical Aspects of Movementassignment that can be seen in (64) is that -roles are not assigned over long distances.
For an argument to receive a -role from a predicate it must be close to it. We can see
this from the fact that the following sentence has just one interpretation:
(66) Sophie suspects that Linda loves Dwain
We can only interpret this sentence with Sophie doing the suspecting, Linda doing
the loving and Dwain getting loved and there is no way to get Sophie associated with
love or Linda and Dwain with suspect. This is simply because Sophie is structurally
closer to suspect and Linda and Dwain are close to love. If love could assign its -
roles over long distances, Sophie might be able to be interpreted as one of its
arguments.
We will adopt the following restrictive condition on -role assignment:
(67) the Locality Restriction on Theta-role Assignment
a predicate assigns its -roles to either its complement or its specifier
According to (67), the structural configuration for all -role assignment is as
follows:
(68) XP
YP X'
X YP
It is a long standing assumption that there is a uniformity in -role assignment
which links certain -roles to certain positions. The reason why the object is assumed
to move in a passive sentence is precisely because of this assumption. In an active
sentence the object occupies the object position, following the verb, and so it is
assumed that in the passive sentence the argument that is interpreted identically to the
object in the active originates from the same position that we see it in in the active:
(69) a Monika munched the sandwich = active
b was munched the sandwich = D-structure of passive
c the sandwich was munched = S-structure of passive
Thus it is assumed that there is a uniform position to which the patient -role is
assigned across different structures. We will actually adopt a very rigid form of this
idea which was first proposed by Baker (1988), called the Uniform Theta-role
Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH):
(70) the Uniform Theta-role Assignment Hypothesis
a -role Þ is assigned in the same structural configuration in all structures in
which it is present
Thus, if we propose that the theme argument is assigned to the specifier of the verb
it is related to in a structure such as: