Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Volume I: Clause Structure, Second edition
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Lgg Typology, Synt Description v. I - Clause structure
φ- vs ver- in German (also with accompanying prepositions von
‘from’ / an ‘to’, as in (16) and (17)). English has relatively few examples of ambiguous verbs of the type exemplified by rent; in most cases the choice of 368 William A. Foley actor as goal vs point of origin is lexicalized through the selection of different verb stems, like buy/sell, borrow/lend, take/give. The choice of actor is not the only alternative in perspective that most lan- guages make available. Consider examples like the following: (19) (a) Howard robbed Frank of $100 (b) Howard stole $100 from Frank The English verbs rob and steal clearly present the same conceptual event – namely, because of Howard’s theft, Frank is $100 poorer – but present it from different perspectives. With rob Frank as direct object is more directly involved in and affected by the action than with steal. Note that (20a) is fine, but (20b) is strange: (20) (a) Howard stole $50 from Frank, but Frank didn’t know it (b) ?Howard robbed Frank of $50, but Frank didn’t know it The strangeness of (20b) is due to the fact that rob requires Frank to be affected by the theft; this is incompatible with denying his awareness of the event. The central affected participant of the event we will call the ‘undergoer’ of the event (comparable to Dowty’s (1991) ‘Proto-Patient’). Lexical alternatives like rob/steal are actually rather rare in English; normally perspective alternatives for undergoer selection are signalled by word order, verbal morphology or prepositional marking changes: (21) (a) The man loaded hay onto the truck (b) The man loaded the truck with hay Note that the (b) example has a specific reading in which the truck is understood as being completely filled with hay. (22) (a) Harry sprayed paint on the wall (b) Harry sprayed the wall with paint (23) (a) John drained the water from the pool (b) John drained the pool of water Note, again, that in the (b) examples the undergoer is normally interpreted as being completely affected, e.g. completely covered with paint or emptied of water, a reading which is not necessary in the (a) examples. In each of these, there is an np which is understood as more completely affected when it is in direct object position than when it is the object of a preposition. Other examples of this type of alternation do not exhibit such marked differences: (24) (a) Sam hit the cane against the wall (b) Sam hit the wall with the cane A typology of information packaging 369 (25) (a) Egbert gave the tortoise to Hortense (b) Egbert gave Hortense the tortoise In (24) and (25) the np in direct object position has greater discourse salience than the one that is the object of the preposition (we are thinking of it more than the other) but there is not a difference in how completely they are affected. A canonical transitive verb like break will assign perspective to two nps, actor perspective to one and undergoer perspective to another. The actor is the participant which performs, initiates or controls the event: it prototypically cor- responds to the X participant in answer to the question ‘what did X do?’ Its most typical formal realization is as the subject of a transitive verb or the prepo- sitionally or obliquely core-marked complement in the corresponding passive: the man (actor) killed the duckling; the duckling was killed by the man (actor). The single core argument of a good number of intransitive verbs (the unergative class) is also an actor: verbs like laugh, say, speak, run, swim, etc.; note that the single core arguments of such verbs do indeed answer the question ‘what did X do?’ ‘X laughed, spoke’, etc. The undergoer is the participant which is affected by the event: it prototypically corresponds to the Y in ‘what happened to Y?’ Its most typical formal realization is as the object of a transitive verb or the subject of the corresponding passive – the man killed the duckling (under- goer), the duckling (undergoer) was killed by the man – and, as we shall see, some verbs, labelled ditransitive, actually take two undergoers. So a canonical transitive verb like kill takes both an actor and an undergoer: the man killed the duckling – ‘what did the man do?’ (actor) ‘the man killed the duckling’; ‘what happened to the duckling?’ (undergoer) ‘the man killed the duckling’. There is also a class of intransitive verbs, the unaccusative verbs, whose sin- gle core argument functions as an undergoer rather than an actor: fall, die, melt, get angry, fall pregnant: ‘what happened to Y?’ ‘Y fell, died, got angry’, etc. Let me represent the choice of actor and undergoer perspective as the assign- ment of features to participants: [ +a] for the actor and [−a] for the undergoer. Universally it seems that a given verb root can only ever have one [ +a] partici- pant in its clause, but some verbs in some languages may permit multiple [ −a] Download 1.59 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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