M. Iriskulov, A. Kuldashev a course in Theoretical English Grammar Tashkent 2008

J. R. Taylor examines the semantic potential of syntactic constructions 
(compare: “He swam across the Channel. He swam the Channel.” In the second 
sentence the “path” is incorporated into the verb: thus, a motion event is 
constructed as a transitive event.).
J.R. Taylor views this semantic divergence as categorial extension motivated by 
metaphor. (R. Dirven and M.A.K. Halliday, the representatives of the functional 
approach in linguistics, deal with sentences like “The fifth day saw our departure.” 
in terms of grammatical metaphor.) 
J. R. Taylor argues that metaphorical extension of the said category 
presupposes that the agent- action- patient schema (characteristics of transitive 

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events) is projected onto states of affairs which are not inherently transitive. Non-
prototypical transitive sentences are interpreted in terms of an agent acting as to 
cause a change of state in a patient: 
e.g.: the sentence “Guns kill people” suggests such like interpretation: “guns” 
are responsible agents for what is happening.
e.g.: “The book sold a million copies” Here the subject “book”, which looks 
more like a patient than an agent, receives certain aspects of agency. And in this 
respect the sentence is interpreted as follows: the seller does not have complete 
control over the act of selling, the successful sale depends on the attributes of the 
thing that is sold.
Thus, J.R. Taylor examines the semantic basis of the prototypical category of 
transitive constructions and states that transitivity is a property of the sentence, not 
lexical items. The prototypical transitive sentence is made up by a prototypical 
subject, which is an agent, and by a prototypical object, which is a patient.
The problem which is to be solved here is to disclose the principles according to 
which we give a particular constituent of the event the status of the syntactic 
subject or that of the syntactic complement (including the object and the 
adverbial). The plausible solution of the problem was suggested by R.Langacker. 
R.Langacker argues that a unified explanation of the syntactic diversity is 
possible if the subject-verb-complement pattern is viewed in terms of 
schematization and understood as a reflection of the general cognitive principles of 
figure/ground segregation, role archetypes and ‘”windowing” of attention. 
According to the figure/ground principle the subject in a simple transitive sentence
corresponds to the figure and the complement – to the ground ( with the object 
being a more prominent element of the ground and the adverbial as less 
prominent), the verb expresses the relationship between figure and ground. So, 
linguistically, the way to manifest prominence is to put the preferred element into 
subject position. The influence of this principle is most plausible in symmetric 
constructions, as illustrated by the sentences: 
a) Susan resembles my sister. 
b) My sister resembles Susan.
The role archetypes principle governs the choice of syntactic figure where the 
figure/ground principle alone doesn’t work.
It should be noted that the role archetypes are by no means a novelty, because 
role archetypes like “agent”, “patient”, “instrumental”, “experiencer” are very 
much the same as “cases” with Ch.Fillmore, “actants”, “participants” with 
L.Tesniere, “semantic roles” with P.Quirk, “theta-roles” with A. Radford 
(transformational grammar). 
In R.Langacker’s conception the roles are not just a linguistic construct, but a