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
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
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