Chapter 1 - Grammatical Foundations: Wordsexist. Different linguists tend to make use of different -roles and there is very little
agreement amongst them. Fortunately, the identity of -roles has very little bearing on
most syntactic processes and we can get a long way without precise definitions
(exercise 3 introduces a wider list of -roles than given here).
Given that the meaning of a predicate which determines the nature of the
arguments is a lexical property, the -roles that it determines must also be part of its
lexical entry. We call the part of a predicate’s lexical entry which informs us about
which -roles the predicate has its theta-grid, and this may be represented as follows:
(36) sleep -grid:
hit -grid: <agent, patient>
see -grid: <experiencer, theme>
place -grid: <agent, patient, location>
(36) clearly represents that sleep is a one-place predicate, hit and see are two-place
predicates and place is a three-place predicate.
So far we have mostly spoken of predicates that happen to be verbs, but it is not the
case that all predicates are verbs. We have seen one case where this was not so, in
(34b). Here we said the predicate was is tall. However considering the meaning of
Tom is tall, we can see that the main semantic relations exist between Tom and tall and
the is part simply expresses that Tom’s being tall is true at the present time (compare
this with Tom was tall). Thus, we might claim that tall, which is an adjective also has a
-role as part of its lexical entry:
(37) tall -grid:
Just like verbs, some adjectives express a relationship between two arguments:
(38) a Fred is fond of Fiona
b Kevin is keen on karate
In these examples we see two arguments being related by an adjective: Fred is the one
who is ‘fond’ and Fiona is the one who he is ‘fond of’, etc. Thus we have the
following lexical entries:
(39) fond -grid: <experiencer, theme>
keen -grid: <experiencer, theme>
Nouns, too, can be used as predicates:(40) Peter is a postman
And again, nouns can be used to express relationships between two or more
arguments:
(41) Picasso’s painting of petunias
In this example, Picasso may be interpreted either as the possessor of the painting, or
the agent who did the painting, while petunias constitutes the subject matter of the
painting. We will consider the thematic status of the possessor in a subsequent section,
but for now we will ignore the issue and suppose a lexical entry as follows:
(42) painting -grid: <agent, theme>