Basic English Syntax with Exercises

theta-grid

1.3.2 Predicates and arguments

Given that the meaning of a predicate which determines the nature of the arguments is a lexical property, the Θ-roles that it determines must also be part of its lexical entry. We call the part of a predicate’s lexical entry which informs us about which Θ-roles the predicate has its theta-grid, and this may be represented as follows:

1.3.2 Predicates and arguments

We might therefore state that the arguments of nouns are optionally represented in an expression and indicate their optionality in the lexical entry by placing the elements of the Θ-grid in brackets:

1.3.2 Predicates and arguments

With reference to the categorial features introduced in the preceding section, note that it is the [–F] categories that can have Θ-grids. [+F] categories, as we will see below, are not specified in their lexical entries for these.

1.3.3 Grammatical aspects of meaning

Functional categories, such as modal auxiliaries and complementisers are specified for the [+F] value and a distinguishing property of these categories is that they are not involved with the assignment of Θ-roles. They therefore lack Θ-grids in their lexical entries.

1.3.4.1 Verbs

What is represented in these lexical entries is that the two verbs are both two-place predicates taking agent and goal (something that an action is directed towards) arguments, but that the goal of await must be nominal while that of wait must be prepositional. The part of the lexical entry that states the categorial status of the complement is known as a subcategorisation frame. Thus a lexical entry for a typical verb will consist of a theta-grid and a subcategorisation frame in addition to phonological and semantic information.

1.3.4.2 Nouns

The next category we will discuss is the noun, which we categorised as bearing the features [–F, +N, –V] above. With verbs, they share the property that they have Θ-grids as part of their lexical entries, being [–F] categories. But they are distinguished from verbs on the other two features and hence do not share many other properties.

1.3.5.1 Inflections

The feature bundle [+F, –N, +V] defines a ‘functional verb’. Such an element would have verbal properties, but no thematic content: it would not be specified for taking arguments in its lexical entry and hence would have no theta-grid. The most obvious thing that fits this bill is the class of auxiliary verbs:

1.3.5.1 Inflections

Given that inflection is a functional category and takes no part in thematic structure, members of this category do not have theta grids as part of their lexical entry. Furthermore, their subcategorisation seems to be much simpler than any thematic category: all inflections are always followed by a verbal element and hence we might suppose that they all subcategorise for verbal complements:

1.3.5.2 Determiners

Like the inflections, the lexical properties of determiners are relatively simple. They have no theta grid and they subcategorise only for nominal complements. If pronouns are determiners, then in their pronominal use they can be considered as ‘intransitive’, taking no complement:

1.3.6 Functionally underspecified categories

The nouns in (190) do not function as the main semantic element of the expression as do those in (191). Note that the expressions in (191) refer to a picture, a disposal and a door respectively, but the referents of the expressions in (190) are wine, tea and tourists respectively. One can pour a bottle of wine and drink a cup of tea, but what is poured and drunk is not the bottle or the cup but the wine and the tea. On the other hand, if one breaks a picture of the president or deplores the disposal of the evidence, it is not the president that gets broken nor the evidence that is deplored. The kind of nouns in (190) are called measure or group nouns and they differ from other nouns in terms of their relationship to their complements. The complements of the nouns in (191) are arguments of those nouns and as such stand in a thematic relationship to them. In other words, these nouns are thematic elements which have Θ-grids in their lexical entries. Measure nouns do not stand in the same relationship to their complements at all and in fact they appear to have a similar relationship to their complements as quantifying determiners do to their nominal complements. This is not a thematic relationship and hence it appears that these nouns are not thematic nouns. Clearly they are not determiners either and hence they seem to be prime candidates to be analysed as non-thematic non-functional nouns.