Delahunty and Garvey
n. Today is the last day to register. (TIME)
o. It is raining. (EMPTY)
Exercise
Using (a) as a model, identify the (whole) subject and then its semantic
role in each of the following sentences:
a. [Macmillan] gave his wife a ring. AGENT
b. The ring was delivered by a liveried messenger.
c. It had been crafted by a skilled goldsmith.
d. Lightning causes forest fires.
e. Carelessness causes injuries.
f. Plastic is derived from petroleum.
g. There are only a few good tickets left.
h. This project cost me a great deal of time.
What problems did you encounter? How did you solve them?
The preceding discussion should make it clear how misleading it is to define
the subject in terms of only a single role, such as “doer of an action.” The
exercise should give you an indication of how to adequately assign the roles
in specific instances.
As we progress through the various sentence patterns, we will take the
subject for granted, except for instances in which its form or semantic role
helps us to understand the pattern.
auxiliary verbs.
Before we deal with the various basic clause patterns, we must discuss a
characteristic that all patterns have in common—their capacity to include
auxiliary verbs such as be, have, do and the modal verbs can, could, may,
might, shall, should, will, would, must. As we noted in other chapters, these
occur before the main verb of the clause:
(47) a. Bill may/must/might leave.
b. Bill is leaving.
c. Bill has left.
d. *Bill left has.
The modal verbs and do are followed by a verb in its infinitival form; the
progressive be is followed by a verb ending in -ing; and the perfective have is