Orð og tunga - 01.06.2006, Page 50

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Orð og tunga
Independently, within the Chomskean tradition, reseachers were
arguing for the importance of general semantic classes of relations
between items which helped to establish their syntactic behaviour -
so-called thematic roles and related concepts (see Jackendoff 1972 and
Fillmore 1966). Thematic roles were adopted in Chomsky's (1982)
Government and Binding Theory as a way of regulating well-formed-
ness of grammatical structures: and theta roles, like preposition selec-
tion, had to be listed in the lexicon.
Thematic role theory was often driven by discussions of "altema-
tions", altemative patterns of syntactic realisation.
4. Passive
a. John hit Bill. Agent - Patient
b. Bill was hit by John. Patient - Agent
5. Dative alternation.
c. John gave a book to Bill. Source - Theme - Goal
d. John gave Bill a book. Source - Goal - Theme
At the crudest level, this meant that the lexicon began to include some
form of semantic information for syntactic purposes.
6. Argument structure - give
a- [---NP^cc/Theme NPq oal]
b- [---NP[3aj^Qoa] NP^cc/Xheme]
It also however stimulated a strong tradition of research conceming
the regularities expressed by labels such as "Theme" and "Goal" and
the pattems of syntactic realisation with which they were associated.
And this brings us to one of the most promising areas in which con-
temporary linguistic theory and lexicographic research can be seen to
interact.
An excellent example for our purposes is the work of Beth Levin,
as it explicitly relates syntactic behaviour and conceptual structure
through the properties of individual verbs: especially her 1993 work
on English verb classes. Levin (1993) classifies verbs in terms of the
alternations that verbs can and cannot undergo. She then looks for the
elements of conceptual meaning that verbs which behave the same
way syntactically share and which differ systematically from the verbs
which do not share their syntactic behaviour.
Consider for instance Saeed's (1997) excellent introductory discus-
sion of Levin's analysis of the three constructions - Middle, Conative,