Chapter 3 - Basic Concepts of Syntactic Theory(71) VP
DP V'
the book V PP
fell off the shelf
Then it follows from the UTAH that all themes in all structures will be assigned to the
specifier of the verb that they are related to. We will see that this is a very restrictive
theory of -role assignment that will force certain analyses of structures which, while
not at first obvious, turn out to have a number of positive features which go to support
them and in turn this supports the assumption of the UTAH in the first place.
There are other aspects of the assignment of -roles than those to do with where
they are assigned. We saw in chapter 1 that for some predicates an argument that they
select as a lexical property does not have to be realised as a syntactic entity but may be
present only at a semantic level. Such an argument would be understood, but unable to
play any role in a sentence such as licensing a reflexive pronoun:
(72) a Paul ate the pie by itself
b *Paul ate by itself
This means that certain -roles do not have to be assigned within a structure.
However, the same is not true for other predicates:
(73) a Fiona found the book
b Fiona found
c found the book
It is not well understood what determines when a -role may be left understood, but it
seems to be an idiosyncratic property of certain predicates. It is generally the case that
-roles must be assigned. The -role assigned to the subject, for example, cannot be
left as understood. Therefore we might propose that there is a general grammatical
condition ensuring the assignment of -roles, unless they are marked in the lexical
entry of a predicate as being able to be understood. Moreover, a theta role can only be
assigned to one argument and cannot be ‘shared out’ between more than one:
(74) *Fiona found the book the pen
We might propose the following condition on -role assignment:(75) a -role must be assigned to one and only one argument
Now if we turn our attention to the arguments themselves we note that it is not
possible to have an argument that is not assigned a -role:
(76) a Sam smiled
b *Sam smiled the cat
theme