Chapter 1 - Grammatical Foundations: WordsAnother difference between the possessor and arguments is that the semantic
relationship that possessors express is rather vague in relation to those expressed by
arguments. Consider the following:
(95) Shufflebotham’s sheep
The relationship between Shufflebotham and the sheep could be almost anything,
ranging from ownership to something far more distant such as the sheep that
Shufflebotham selected in a sheep of the year contest. Thematic arguments, on the
other hand, have very definite interpretations: an agent is someone who consciously
performs an action and cannot be interpreted as anything else.
A final difference between possessors and arguments is that the possessor
relationship is restricted to nouns whereas thematic relationships seem to be available
to all thematic categories: we can find themes, experiencers, etc. for verbs, nouns or
adjectives.
For these reasons, therefore, we will not consider the possessor to be a thematic
role included in the lexical entry of the nouns, but something that can be added to any
compatible noun. Below we can see some example lexical entries for nouns:
(96) wait category: [–F, +N, –V]
-grid: <agent, goal>
subcat: [prepositional]
belief category: [–F, +N, –V]
-grid: <experiencer, theme>
subcat: [prepositional]
fight category: [–F, +N, –V]
-grid: <agent, theme>
subcat: [prepositional]
expectation category: [–F, +N, –V]
-grid: <experiencer, proposition>
subcat: [sentential]
plague category: [–F, +N, –V]
-grid:
subcat: [prepositional]
cat category: [–F, +N, –V]
-grid: <∆>
subcat: [∆]
3.4.3 Adjectives
We now turn to the [–F, +N, +V] category: adjectives. As their categorial features
suggest they share properties with both nouns and verbs, though obviously differ from
both.
Adjectives tend to describe states, properties or attributes of things, though as
usual, one needs to be careful with semantic definitions of syntactic categories. This
category tends to be used in one of two ways; either as a modifier of a noun or as a
predicate in a sentence:
(97) a a stupid man
b the man was stupid