Nastassja Riemermann ([info]tsukikage85) wrote in [info]linguistics,
@ 2008-04-11 00:51:00
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Current mood: confused
Current music:Savage Garden - Affirmation

thematic roles
I know that thematic roles can be kind of... tricky... to assign, but what would you say would be the theta role of the subject in "These books sell well"? I guess I've just been defaulting to "theme", or occasionally "theme/experiencer" for a lot of these sentences when I can't think of anything more suitable, although I can't say I'm comfortable with "experiencer" in this particular case...


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[info]bwillsouth
2008-04-11 07:12 am UTC (link)
Not quite sure! The books are definitely a kind of undergoer. Of course grammatically they're the subject, but in point of fact they're being acted upon, although they're definitely not cast as a patient. Whoever is buying the books doesn't merit consideration in a construction like that. I'm not sure if undergoer is a "proper" role, but that's how I'd classify it. The word "experiencer" implies a kind of agency or animacy to me.

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[info]tsukikage85
2008-04-11 07:32 am UTC (link)
In my understanding of "experiencer", it doesn't really require agency, but it seems to require animacy, anyway. Like, I'd think a dog could be an experiencer.

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[info]bwillsouth
2008-04-11 07:35 am UTC (link)
Yeah, agreed. Incidentally, I find it kind of hilarious how the use of the word "experiencer" here is completely metalinguistic: the use of a term within theoretical linguistics is constrained by an aspect of that word within a language.

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[info]tsukikage85
2008-04-11 07:42 am UTC (link)
I feel lame for admitting this, but... huh? I mean, I know what metalinguistic means, but beyond that I'm kind of missing the point you're trying to make.

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[info]bwillsouth
2008-04-11 07:47 am UTC (link)
Oh, I meant that my own reservations, at least, about using "experiencer" to describe an inaninmate object come entirely from the fact that the word "experience" only really applies to animate nouns in the English language.

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[info]tsukikage85
2008-04-11 05:09 pm UTC (link)
Ah, now I get it.

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[info]postpunkjustin
2008-04-11 08:53 am UTC (link)
I think I like "theme" for the theta-role here. I think that's usually my intuition when a nominal is base-generated as the complement to a verb and then raised to a subject position (non-passively).

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[info]gryphonavocatio
2008-04-11 09:35 am UTC (link)
Theme sounds right to me too, though I do not consider myself a semanticist by any means.

My training in semantics actually focused on Dowty's so-called 'proto roles', wherein a verb's lexical semantics will assign one complement a proto-agent role and another a proto-patient role. It was partially (but not primarily) motivated by the fact that its not always clear what role a noun ought to be assigned, leading some linguists to define an arbitrary number of thematic roles. The only reason I bring it up is because I actually found it helpful for figuring out some of the normal roles. But I'm weird like that.

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[info]athamese
2008-04-11 02:26 pm UTC (link)
I like "theme" here, too. This is what I've always called "middle-voice." The subject of the verb certainly isn't doing anything, something is being done to it.

I've considered them in parallel with other middle-voice sentences:
Lettuce keeps well in a fridge.
The letter arrived two days late.

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[info]mintyfreshsocks
2008-04-11 02:42 pm UTC (link)
In that particular example, I agree with everyone else - "theme" is the closest you can get.

If you're interested in this construction, check out some Ancient Greek or Swedish data - the middle voice in those languages has a lot of construals, including causative, benefactive, reciprocal, etc. It's quite interesting.

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