The event semantics of syntactic structures
Edward T. Kako · Scholarly Commons (University of Pennsylvania) · 1998
Linguists and psycholinguists have traditionally argued that meaning comes primarily or exclusively from words, and that syntactic structures merely reflect those meanings. This dissertation explores an alternate view, namely that syntactic structures carry meanings of their own independent of the words which appear in them. The first part of the dissertation shows that comprehenders can identify the meanings of the SUBCATEGORIZATION FRAMES of verbs—whether a verb takes a direct object (John ate HIS APPLE), an indirect object (Susan showed the map TO BOB), an embedded sentence (Bill thinks THAT IT WILL RAIN TOMORROW), and so on. Given the sentence The rom gorped the blick to the dax, participants inferred that gorping involved specific event-related properties like TRANSFER and CAUSATION. Moreover, the compatibility of a verb and frame (i.e., the naturalness of the pairing) depended importantly upon the semantic overlap between them. The power of Verb-Frame Overlap to predict naturalness varied as a function of the frame's “promiscuity”—number and types of verbs it usually appears with. The second part of the dissertation shows that the GRAMMATICAL ROLES subject and object also carry meanings of their own. Given the simple Transitive sentence The grack mecked the zarg, comprehenders rated the subject as being more like the Agent (doer) of the action and the object as more like the Patient (done-to), even without guidance from the verb. Given a Passive sentence, however (The rom was gorped by the fep), they assigned Agent properties to the object and Patient properties to the subject, indicating that thematic role properties are assigned exclusively by underlying role, and not at all by surface role. In a sentence with. three noun phrases—The rom gorped the blick to the dax—the direct object and indirect object were seen as equally Patient-like, though the direct object was seen as notably less Patient-like in this frame than in the simple Transitive, suggesting that the overall configuration of a frame has important semantic effects on individual noun phrases. The dissertation concludes by considering the implications of these findings for language architecture and language evolution.