Jackendoff's semantic primitives

A another piece I am using is from Ray Jackendoff [1], A System fo Semantic Primitives, which is a simplification of some of his other work. In this article, he presents three general types of verbs, which he labels GO, BE,and STAY verbs, and two general tyes of agency, CAUSE and LET. BE sets forth the location of an object relative to some object. GO shows movement, perhaps metaphorical, to some goal. STAY says that the object is Remaining at some location. BE verbs represent states of affairs, while GO and STAY verbs represent events.

CAUSE is the general causation, LET is permissive agency. CAUSE and LET differ in the kind of action performed by the Agent: CAUSE brings the event about, and LET is, in Jakendoff's terms in the article, ceasing to prevent the event.

Steven Pinker, in The Stuff of Thought, relies on this distinction between CAUSE and LET, for example, the says, on page 49, that the verb pour "specifies a causal relation of 'letting' rather than 'forcing'"; which is what appears to be the difference between Jackendoff's LET and CAUSE.


[1]Jackendoff, Ray, A System fo Semantic Primitives (pdf), in Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing, 10-13 June 1975

Quote

An attorney who represents himself has a fool for a client.
-- old lawyer's adage

Scott Delancey's Case Grammar

WARNING: I am strictly a self-taught amatuer with no formal training
in this at all. I have an interest, and am going to play with this here,
seeing where I can go with it. But don't take what I say all very seriously,
I'm making it up as I go along. I'll try to reference sources when I have
them, so look at them.

The first piece I will be using comes from Scott Delancy.

Scott Delancey [1] presents a kind of minimalist case grammar, in which every clause describes, either literally or metaphorically, a locative relation between a Theme and a Location; states as well as physical and temporal locations are Locations. Thus ever verb has are two required cases, which he labels Theme and Loc.

He classifies verbs into three broad classes: the first two are states, where the Theme is located at Loc (Theme AT Loc), and events, where the Theme changes locations or states and ends up at Loc (Theme GOTO Loc, which leads to Theme AT Loc). He then presents a third class of verbs, where an agent causes the event,(Agent CAUSE Theme GOTO Loc). The Agent can be anything that can be construed to cause the event, an example he gives is "The beauty of this vista has inspired many artists", with "beauty" thus being the Agent.

This produces a grammar with three cases (Theme, Loc, and Agent), which fall into clauses which are states (Theme AT Loc), simple events, or inchoatives, (Theme GOTO Loc), and complex events, or causatives (Agent CAUSE Theme GOTO Loc).

As an example, he uses this theory to explain the behaviors of verbs like break, with the causative alternation (the plate broke and John broke the plate), which he takes as incorporation of the Loc in the meaning of the verb, (plate GOTO-broken and Agent CAUSE plate
GOTO-broken), and those like hit, which do not; he takes as
incorporating the Theme (John hit the plate being John
CAUSE hit-GOTO plate).

[1] Delancey has placed on the web several articles discussing this grammar:

Event Construal and Case Role Assignment, in Proc. of the 17th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1991), pp. 338-353
Figure and Ground in Argument Structure, LSA Summer Institute, UC Santa Barbara, 2001, lecture 3


What an Innatist Argument Should Look Like

What MIGHT be innate: Perceptual structure in linguistic structure

Verbal Case Frames in English and Tibetan

Argument Structure of Klamath Bipartite Stems, SSILA Conference, San Diego

Page 123, Sentences 6-8

Going around the blogosphere is the page 123 challenge:
Here are the Rules:
1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth complete sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences, (sentences 6, 7, and 8).
5. Tag five people

I have at hand two books. The first is Case Grammar Theory by Walter A. Cook. The sentences are:

... Fillmore adds both coreferential roles and lexicalized roles in his 1971 model.

Jackendoff's stated reasons for preferring the system of thematic relations over case grammar are that (1) 'it provides a way of unifying various uses of the same morphological verb' and (2) it allows us to state certain generalizations for some transformational rules such as Passive, Reflexive, and Equi NP deletion. As for the first reason, it was Fillmore's stated objective to unify different uses of the same verb, such as the intransitive/transitive uses of the verb break and the use of the verb with and without the Instrument case. ...

OK, maybe I should try the other one, a SF novel Lost in Translation by Edward Willett

... Who is more likely to be working for those who want a war that could destroy the Commonwealth and with it the Guild of Translators: Those S'sinn who are whole and l0ng for revenge and glory, or me? Destroy the Commonwealth, destroy the Guild, and you destroy me. I have no part of the glory of the S'sinn race: I died to that race the day the human beamer crippled my wing. ...

That may be better.

As for tagging others, well, anyne who happens on this blog can consider yourself tagged (unless of course you don't want to be tagged)...