thematic relations and arguments

Thematic Relations and ArgumentsAuthor(s): Terence ParsonsSource: Linguistic Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 635-662Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4178917 .

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Thematic Relations and Arguments Terence Parsons

Thematic relations can be accurately defined by formulas like "x is the theme of event e iff e is of x." These definitions, though not providing insight, can correctly classify the participants of events and states and defuse a variety of criticisms of the use of thematic relations in semantic theory. Further, these relations can be usefully employed in logical forms associated with nouns as well as verbs (the stabbing of Caesar, as well as stab Caesar) while preserving the important differences between the ways in which nouns and verbs combine with their arguments.

Keywords: thematic, semantics, argument, event, state

In Parsons 1990 I developed a semantic theory that makes crucial use of the semantic notion of thematic relation. The first goal of this article is to improve the explanation of thematic relations given there. The second is to respond to the criticism (originating in Dowty 1989 and endorsed in Hornstein 1993) that facts about the way that verbs and nouns combine with their arguments and adjuncts require reformulation of the theory. In discussing the second topic, I defend a version of semantic optionality for "missing" arguments.

The notion of thematic relation that I appeal to is a semantic one. I do not know whether thematic relations of the traditional sort-Agent, Theme, Instrument, . . .-are needed in syntax or not. 1 I need a syntactic theory that provides a basis for the identification of semantic thematic relations, but this is a relatively meager assumption. I need only that the syntax provide structural notions such as direct object and indirect object, and that it distinguish various senses of verbs and nouns. The semantic portion of the

I wish to thank Emmon Bach and Barbara Partee for helpful discussion of a very early draft of this article. They are not responsible for any of its present defects.

' There are several views about the place of thematic relations in syntax. This is not a paper about syntax, so I will not enter into this issue here. I am willing to presuppose something like Grimshaw's (1990) account.

(i) Verbs and verbal nouns have semantic thematic roles associated with them in the lexicon. (ii) There is a language-independent ordering of these roles. (iii) That ordering yields a syntactic ordering of the roles associated with each lexical item. (iv) The syntactic ordering does not preserve the identity of the semantic roles, but it figures in syntax

in particular ways, such as in the 0-theory of Government-Binding (GB) Theory. See also Higginbotham 1989 about extending the notion of thematic relation to include event arguments of verbs.

Linguistic Inquiry, Volume 26, Number 4, Fall 1995 635-662 ?) 1995 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology 635



636 TERENCE PARSONS

lexicon will then say, for each sense of each verb or noun, which semantic relations are needed for which grammatical position.

It will help to have some idea of the use to which I put thematic relations and other relations in doing semantics. The idea can be most readily conveyed by examples. The sentence

Brutus stabbed Caesar violently in the back with a knife in the agora

has a logical form made explicit by the predicate calculus representation2

(3e)[Stabbing(e) & Agent(e,Brutus) & Theme(e,Caesar) & Violent(e) & InTARGET(e,the back) & With(e,the knife) & InLOCATION(e,the agora)].

That is,

For some event e: e is a stabbing the Agent of e is Brutus the Theme of e is Caesar e was violent e was in the back e was with the knife e was in the agora.

(I assume a similar analysis of state sentences.) I call attention to two aspects of this formulation. First, it appeals to the core thematic

relations Agent and Theme, to the questionably thematic relations Instrument and Loca- tion (with and in), and to the clearly nonthematic relations of being in the back and being violent. Second, it assumes that each of these has the same semantic type: properties (sometimes relational properties) of events.3

I take for granted throughout that causative and inchoative sentences require special treatment, because they make appeal to multiple states and events. An example is that

Agatha felled the tree into the pond with an ax

has a form like this: 4

2 An additional clause is needed to link the event with its time of occurrence, a claim meaning 'e occurs at t', and the past tense needs to place t in the past. I ignore these additional complexities because they are not relevant to the issues discussed in this article.

I call the displayed representation a "logical form." Clearly this is not the same as an LF form from GB Theory. My forms can be read as statements of the semantic correlates of such LF forms; they are not intended to compete with LF representations as alternatives.

3Sentence modifiers, such as allegedly or in a dream, have quite different types; they are not discussed here.

4 The displayed form reveals the analysis of the causative character of the verb; its inchoative character requires additional structure in the next-to-last clause, with Into(e',x) being analyzed as



THEMATIC RELATIONS AND ARGUMENTS 637

For some event e: Agatha is the Agent of e e was with the ax.

For some event e': e' is a falling the Theme of e' was the tree e' was into the pond e CAUSED e .

I systematically avoid causative examples, but only because of their complexity. They are no more difficult to analyze than simpler constructions.

The "underlying event" type of analysis is motivated by a number of consequences that should be yielded by a good semantic theory. They include a logic of verb modifiers, an account of the relations between adjectives and -ly adverbs (such as between violent and violently) and between nominal gerunds and verbs (such as between a singing and sing), an account of the relations between explicit and implicit talk about events (between the singing of the song and They sang the song), an account of the semantics of perception verbs, and various relations among causatives and their intransitive counterparts (between Mary felled the tree and The tree fell, and between The door opened and The door is open). These are articulated in Parsons 1990, and are all ignored here. The goal of the present article is not to advertise the virtue of the approach but to improve its foundations.

1 Thematic Relations

The semantic theory under discussion assumes that thematic roles such as Agent, Instru- ment, Theme, . . . correspond to relations between events (or states) and things. This is problematic because there is widespread criticism in the literature of any appeal to traditional thematic roles. I am concerned here with qualms to the effect that it is not clear how many or which thematic roles there are, and qualms about how to tell which role goes with which place associated with a verb. In spite of the qualms, however, there is widespread agreement about thematic roles; writers mostly agree on what the options are and how they are realized.

Thematic relations are almost always drawn from this list:'

For some state s: e' is a becoming of s s is a state of being in x the Theme of s = the Theme of e'.

See Parsons 1990 for discussion. 5 The list is from Haegeman 1991, with Instrument added. It agrees with Dowty 1989:69 for most of them;

1989:92 for the last three. Fillmore 1968 omitted Experiencer, Source, and Goal, and included Factitive, a category that has not caught on. Grimshaw 1990 omits Instrument, Benefactive, and Patient. Rizzi 1990:86 omits Source, Instrument, Benefactive, and Location. The commonest divergence in lists stems from whether authors try to give the whole list or only the core cases of Agent, Experiencer, Theme, Source, and Goal.



638 TERENCE PARSONS

Agent Mary left early.

Experiencer He likes roses. Theme/Patient Brutus stabbed Caesar. Source We bought it from Agatha.

Goal We sold it to Sam. Instrument They opened it with the key.

Benefactive We threw her a big party. Location It's hot in the studio.

There are often allusions to hosts of other options waiting in the wings to confound us, but they are usually not specified, and they are rarely discussed in any detail.6

One conclusion is agreed upon by all commentators: the various thematic relations have not been specified in accurate ways. But this is well known in part because authors agree about the classifications that are supposed to result from the specified criteria, and about ways in which the criteria fail to provide for them. For example, a typical definition distinguishes two types of Theme (often called "Theme" and "Patient"):

The Theme proper is the thing that is said to move or remain at rest. The Patient is the thing that is said to be affected or acted upon.

But consider the sentence I play a sonata. Since the sonata is not said either to move or to remain at rest, that means it can't be the Theme proper. And since it is not said to be affected or acted upon, that means it can't be a Patient. But everyone agrees that the answer we are after is that it is the Theme (or Theme/Patient). The criticisms of the criteria are compelling because of agreement about what the right answer is supposed to be.

The case of Patient/Theme is a special one, special because researchers have come up with two fairly clear proposed criteria, which are almost totally disjoint, and which do not between them exhaust the intended category. The general category, most often simply called "Theme," is not accurately captured by either of these subspecifications. So much the worse for the subspecifications. I assume that there is one category here, which I will call Theme. (For justification, see the next section.)

1.1 Defining Thematic Relations

I suspect that thematic relations have gone unspecified in part because researchers have sought informative substantive analyses of them. Such analyses, if available, would have to be stated in the same language that utilizes them, and it is not obvious that this can be done in a satisfactory, noncircular way. Instead, I suggest that we see how far we can go with accurate but "trivial" definitions. Suppose we accept the fact that thematic

6 An exception is Jackendoff 1990, which provides the ingredients for generating a potentially infinite number of relations.




relations relate events and/or states to things. Ignore states for the moment. Then, most thematic relations can be defined as follows:7

Agent e is by x Experiencer x experiences e Theme e is of x Source e is from x Goal e is to x Instrument e is with x [or 'e is by means of x'] Benefactive e is for x

We have to assume that the desired analyses may not exist, and we may only have the accurate definitions given above. But the definitions are not useless; they put some problems in perspective, and they help in deciding which things bear which relations to which events.

If the proposed definitions are right, we have some clear answers to a wide variety of questions about choice of thematic role. Consider a case in which someone sells Mary a book. Was the sale to Mary? Yes, it was. That settles the issue: Mary is the Goal.8 Was the sale of Mary? No. So she isn't the Theme. Was it by her? No, so she isn't the Agent. Was it for her? Well, it might have been, so she might stand in the Benefactive relation to the selling. We may have sold the bookfor Mary, in which case she is surely the Benefactive, or we may not have done this, in which case she is not the Benefactive. This uncertainty does not, however, affect the assignment of logical forms to sentences. Since the sentence We sold Mary a book does not say whether or not we sold the book for Mary, the logical form of that sentence will not identify her as Benefactive. This is consistent with her being, or not being, the Benefactive in the selling.

Another illustration: we worried above about whether the sonata I played was a Theme. Well, was the playing of the sonata? Don't worry about whether the question Was the playing of the sonata? is nearly ungrammatical. Maybe it isn't proper English, but it is a sentence that speakers understand, and all we need for the test is understanding. The answer is that the playing is of the sonata, and that makes it the Theme. Furthermore, whenever x plays y, the playing is of y, so the direct object of play is always a Theme.9

7 Dowty (1989:113) proposes some of these, not as definitions of relations between individuals and events, but as indirect consequences of the fact that such prepositions are used with verbs "to mark arguments on verbs and nominals."

8 Suppose that Mary explains quantum mechanics to Fred. Some writers have held that Fred is the Goal here since, in some metaphoric sense, the explanation passes from Mary to him. The definitions I suggest do not require modification for examples employing metaphor. In the explaining case, the explaining is literally to Fred, and so he is the Goal.

9 To apply the test for verbs and adjectives, we need a way to refer to the appropriate event or state. For verbs, use the definite article and the gerund, for example, the stabbing. Since "the stabbing" was of Caesar, Caesar was the Theme of the stabbing. For adjectives, the easiest test is to use the construction the being __ or the state of being ; this shows, for example, that the NP occupying the blank in full of is Theme, since if a tank is full of water, the being full is of water. (The test for adjectives employs the most awkward wording of any of the tests; select the answer that is best, taking the awkwardness as a working condition.)



640 TERENCE PARSONS

The definitions allow us to correlate arguments of verbs with roles. If we ignore causatives and higher-order event talk (and if we focus on event verbs as opposed to state verbs), the options are

Active direct object Theme(/Patient) Active indirect object Source, Goal, Benefactive Active subject Agent, Experiencer, Instrument, Theme'0

The next question lurking in the wings is whether we know what our terminology means. After all, our test relies on understanding prepositions, and prepositions are known to be ambiguous. But this is no more intractable than other ambiguities that we live with all the time. The ambiguity of prepositions is on a par with that of other common words, such as go. In practice, it is no more difficult to distinguish the senses of prepositions than it is to distinguish the senses of verbs, and it is no more difficult to tell which senses of the prepositions are intended in the definitions proposed above.

Not everyone will agree with this. Isn't there a theoretical difficulty in principle in telling whether from means the same in I got the idea from Mary and I got the book from Fred? Of course there is. But it is no different from the difficulty in principle in telling whether work means the same in Your theory doesn't work and Your carburetor doesn't work. The latter difficulty does not mean that we give up on the syntax and semantics of the verb work. By parity, we should not adopt a methodological stance that prohibits the meanings of prepositions from appearing in logical forms.

I am not saying that I or anyone else is sanguine about not having more informative answers to these questions. But this is part of the standard working conditions under which we theorize. The real question is what turns on the issue, and there is no single answer to that. In the following I focus on some relevant complexities.

1.2 Claims That Thematic Roles Do Not Work as Intended

There are a number of arguments in the literature that any appeal to thematic roles must break down in crucial cases. I cannot survey them all, but here is a sampling.

1.2.1 Defective Criteria Dowty (1989:105-106) raises a difficulty for traditional criteria for roles. As an example, he argues that if I sell you a car for $5, then since the $5 changes possession just as surely as does the car, it satisfies popular accounts of Themehood just as much as the car does. But if the $5 is a Theme, then we can interchange Themes in the logical forms proposed above, and it follows that I sold you $5 for a car, that I sold you a car for a car, and so on.

There are many cases like this. They all result from taking seriously proposed criteria that are defective. (That is Dowty's point: that the criteria are defective.) My conclusion is: so much the worse for the criteria. We would have a problem if researchers were unsure about whether the $5 or the car is the Theme, but what makes Dowty's example

10 The active subject is a Theme in the case of unaccusative verbs.




so compelling is that there is no disagreement at all in the case. This problem disappears if we take seriously the definitions proposed above. Was the selling of the car? Yes. Was it the selling of $5? No. Then the car is the Theme and the $5 is not. The fact that both of these change possession is irrelevant.

1.2.2 Homonyms of Prepositions Another potentially problematic case is I sold a car for $5. Since the selling is for $5, doesn't the theory then make the $5 the Benefactive? No, this is a different sense offor. When I give the definitions of thematic relations, I use ambiguous prepositions. I assume that my readers are conversant with the prepositions' various senses, and I only need to identify which sense I intend. I can communicate this by various means, such as the use of illustrative examples. I then rely on the reader to know when an example uses the preposition in the same sense. In the case just given, I assume that the reader recognizes that the sense of for in which I sold the car for $5 is not the same sense in which I throw a party for Mary. (Suppose that I sold the car on her behalf. Then I sold a car for Mary for $5. The first for is Benefactive, and the second one is not. The second use of for does not mean any of the thematic relations; it is another use of the preposition.)11

It is important to apply the definitions using prepositions following the copula, not in other constructions, such as appositive uses. Thus, Mary's singing is not of Mary, and so she is not the Theme of her own singing, in spite of the fact that we speak of the singing of Mary. In the latter construction we use of in appositive position; this is a grammatical marking of the genitive and is not relevant to the test proposed above. (In the genitive construction with a gerund, the of indicates whatever thematic relation the verb bears to its active subject. This yields the interpretation of the shooting of the hunters that has the hunters doing the shooting. The other interpretation comes from interpreting the of as standing for the thematic role Theme.)

1.2.3 Treating Thematic Relations as Properties It is important to keep in mind that thematic relations are not properties of individuals; they are relations between individuals and events. For example, that a sentence entails that someone is an Agent does not necessarily make that person an Agent of the event specified by the verb of the sentence.12 One cannot argue as follows:

In Mary fed her baby the baby has to eat; therefore, it is an Agent; therefore, it is an Agent of the feeding.

" Another example of prepositional ambiguity is the ambiguity of to. I assume that its use above to characterize the relation of Goal is recognizably different from its use as a preposition of direction. Otherwise, the test would identify Chicago as the Goal in the construction I drove to Chicago; it would do this because the driving is to Chicago, in the directional sense of to. Another mistake to be careful of is reading by as short for by means of; this can incorrectly assign the key as Agent in an opening of a door by a key.

12 On the view I endorse it is essential not to construe a thematic relation as "a cluster of entailments and presuppositions shared by certain arguments of certain verbs" (Dowty 1989:76), if these are construed as properties, and not as relations to the event in question. For example, Dowty suggests that in the initial stages of theorizing we might regard "the thematic role Agent . . . as a set of properties including 'is a rational and sentient being', 'acts voluntarily in this circumstance', and so on." The first of these examples is a property,



642 TERENCE PARSONS

The question of Agenthood is not whether one may infer that the baby is an Agent of something, but whether one may infer that the baby is an Agent of the feeding. And this cannot be inferred.

1.2.4 Causatives Causative constructions complicate the situation by making appeal to multiple events. If these multiple events are distinguished in logical forms, the thematic relations can combine with the right relata. So we need not worry about counterexamples like this:

In Mary galloped her horse Mary is Agent of the galloping, but so is the horse. It follows that their roles are interchangeable, and so the horse galloped Mary.

The logical form of Mary galloped the horse is something like this:'3

For some event e: Mary is the Agent of e.

For some event e': The horse is the Agent of e' e' is a galloping e CAUSES e'.

This makes Mary and the horse Agents of distinct events, and their roles are thus not interchangeable. I think that this is also the right way to handle the following examples:'4

They deprived Mary of the money. They freed Mary of an obligation. They cured Mary of that desire.

These are causatives, based on the intransitive Mary is deprived of some money, Mary is free of an obligation, and Mary is cured of that desire. These latter sentences are adjectival sentences, in spite of the fact that in two of them the adjectives look like past participles. (See Parsons 1990 for discussion of such adjectives.) I do not know what to say about Defiance cost us the ability to speak.

1.2.5 Improper Identification of Events The baby-feeding example given above would be a problem if the feeding and the eating were the same event; they clearly are not. But in other cases this is not so obvious. Other arguments against the coherence of

not a relation; the second includes the phrase in this circumstance, which hints at a relation, but can be read either way. (Dowty (1989:83) agrees that it is better to see thematic roles as "relations between individuals and events.") My view makes no sense at all if thematic relations are reconstrued as thematic properties.

13 I say "something like this" because (a) I believe that the horse should be identified as the Theme of e' and (b) I am uncertain whether the horse should be identified as the Agent of e'. We know that one normally gallops a horse by getting it to gallop "on its own," but I am not sure that the sentence tells us this. If Mary could directly control the horse's neural firings by a computer, we might say that she was galloping the horse in a situation in which the horse is not the Agent of its own galloping. If this is right, the issue of two Agents does not even arise. But the theory escapes the objection even if there are two Agents.

14 From Taisuke Nishigauchi, cited in Ladusaw and Dowty 1988:65.




thematic relations exploit this possibility in a more plausible setting. Suppose that I sell

you a car. Then, presumably, you buy a car from me. I am the Agent of the selling, and you are the Agent of the buying. But if the buying and the selling were one and the same event, then you would be the Agent of the selling. It would follow that you sold yourself a car!15

This problem arises only if the buying and the selling are the same event. But they are not. Granted, there can be no buying without a selling, and vice versa, but this does not make the events the same. You might have bought the car with a credit card, but I didn't sell it to you with a credit card. The sale might have been illegal without the purchase being illegal. The sale might have been by me without it being by you.16

The term event is vague in ordinary usage, and people sometimes understand events to be large things that encompass all that goes on in a given region between specified individuals. That is not the notion that is employed in this account. (See Parsons 1990: 153-166 for evidence that instrumentals are relations to events, and for additional discussion of this general point.)17

1.3 State Sentences

In Parsons 1990 I tried to use the same thematic relations in state sentences as in event sentences. This was because I was worried about unclarity about which roles there are, and I thought to minimize the unclarity by using the smallest number of roles I could

15 I assign thematic roles in this example based on my own definitions. The most popular variant in the literature would make me the Source in the selling and make you the Goal in the buying. If the buying is the selling, it follows that you are both Source and Goal, and thus you sell yourself the car. So on the variant assignment of thematic relations the problem is the same as the one I discuss in the text, and the solution is of the same sort: Source and Goal are relations to two different events.

16 This issue is relevant to the difference between my view and that of Dowty (1989). Dowty sees thematic relations between events and things as derivative from grammatical relations. For example, an event is by a person if and only if that person is the referent of a subject of a true sentence containing a salient verb that characterizes the event. So my eating breakfast is by me because of the truth of the sentence I ate breakfast. This makes the by relation derivative on the grammatical subject-of relation. Dowty adds suggestive remarks relating this idea to the language-learning situation.

This view is inherently plausible, and, as stated, it is compatible with the view under examination in most cases. I do not think of thematic relations as being grammatically derivative in this way, but it is consistent with most of what I say to do so. The perspectives diverge if we find two sentences whose verbs characterize the same event but that have different agentive subjects; in this case the theory as I give it becomes inconsistent, as described above. Dowty's perspective allows one to shrug and to note that this merely reveals that our projection of grammatical relations onto the world is not fully unambiguous, as many have suspected all along. This possibility cannot be ruled out a priori, and if it were realized, it would falsify the theory I am describing; that indicates part of the theory's empirical import. I do not think that it is false in this way, but the possibility is there and it is an important element in evaluating the account.

17 I regard the evidence as overwhelming that instrumentals are predicates of events; see discussion in Parsons 1990, especially chapter 4. The argument given above about the legality of buyings and sellings is less conclusive. I incline toward the simple view that actions are what are classified as legal and illegal, and that actions are events with Agents. With these assumptions the argument I gave is pertinent. Others would want to admit actions as entities distinct from events, and still others would wish to talk about events (or actions) being legal or illegal "under a description." These are options that are impossible to refute; I reject them because the introduction of these further devices makes the overall theory considerably weaker in its predictions. The best theory is the one that makes the strongest predictions just short of falsehood.



644 TERENCE PARSONS

get away with. In hindsight, this was an inappropriate choice, and the following modification is better.

The major thematic relation needed in the case of state sentences is that between the referent of the active subject of the sentence and the state picked out by the verb. This is the relation of being in the state. If we say that Mary is sick or that John knows the answer, then Mary is in a certain state of sickness and John is in a certain state of knowledge.18 Let me call this the In-ness relation, since it has no conventionally recog- nized title, and since its definition is

x is in s.

The logical form of Mary is sick will then be

(3s)[s is a being-sick & In(s,Mary)].

The direct objects of noncausative transitive state verbs remain Themes. For example, the symbolization of

Mary believes what John said

is

(3s)[s is a state of believing & In(Mary,s) & Theme(s,what John said)].

What John said is the Theme, because the believing is of what John said. Many of the puzzling cases in the literature concern thematic relations in state sen-

tences, or in "stative" sentences that in my opinion appeal neither to events nor to states. In the remainder of this section I address some of these.

1.3.1 Cases in Which No Thematic Relations Occur I have found little evidence that underlying events or states are appealed to in the logical forms of nouns, except for those (such as destruction) that are derived from verbs (see Parsons 1990:chap. 10). If there are no such states, we need not worry about trying to identify thematic relations in sentences such as

Mary is a doctor.

On the other hand, if a noun such as doctor picks out underlying states, then their subjects will be in a state of being a doctor, and so they will stand in the In-ness relation to those states. So either there is no thematic relation, or it is the In-ness relation.

1 When the verb is one of psychology or perception, the In-ness relation coincides with what I identified in Parsons 1990 as the Experiencer relation, so I now replace the symbolization of Mary sees the dog,

(3s)[s is a seeing & Experiencer(s,Mary) & Theme(s,dog)], by

(3s)[s is a seeing & In(s,Mary) & Theme(s,dog)]. There is no inconsistency in seeing such uses of the In-ness relation as overlapping uses of the Experiencer relation, but the In-ness relation is correct for the general case. Sometimes when someone is in a state the state is an experience, but not always.




I do not see any need of thematic roles for the bare copula when used in identity sentences, such as

That obelisk is the monument.

The reason that it is difficult to find thematic roles for the obelisk and the monument in this example, I think, is that there are none. The copula and the is of identity may have associated (syntactic) 0-roles, but these particular 0-roles do not identify semantic thematic relations.

This point perhaps extends also to the special case of the verb differ when used explicitly as the opposite of identity, as in

That point differs from the one you made earlier

(from Dowty 1989:107). A similar point may also apply to the technical notions used in mathematics, such as being even or being less than.

1.3.2 Comparatives Dowty (1989:107) raises the question of how to identify distinct thematic roles for Mary and John in Mary is as tall as John. The worry is that either we will be unable to say what their roles are, or we will have to assign them the same role, thus contravening a well-entrenched principle that no two NPs ever occupy the same thematic role relative to a verb.19

Whatever forms comparatives have, they are complicated. For example, Mary is as tall as John means the same as Mary is as tall as John is, and the extra copula tells us that something special is going on here. Both sentences mean something like 'How tall Mary is is how tall John is'. The context is special, its syntax is special, and its semantics are distinctive. Such sentences probably make appeal to two different (compared) states, one of John's and one of Mary's. Both John and Mary have the same role in each of their own states; this is the same role that is appealed to in the simpler sentence Fido is tall, the In-ness relation. The expansion of such comparisons as illustrated above actually yields two verbs, so it may even be possible to avoid violating the "one NP per role per verb" principle. However they are analyzed, the complexity of comparatives provides for a viable analysis even if the roles of the compared entities are the same.

1.3.3 Symmetric Predicates Comparatives (of the form x is as R as y) are a special case of symmetric predicates; other symmetric predicates generate puzzles about roles, since (supposedly) we cannot distinguish different roles for both the subject and the object.

There are cases like resemble. I think that resemble is only apparently symmetric. My horse might resemble a unicorn without any unicorn resembling it. And even if we stick to resemblance as relating specific existing individuals, we might judge that x resembles y without judging that y resembles x. We do so because what is distinctive

19 I endorse this principle, but not because I find it a priori plausible. I endorse it because I have not come across any compelling counterexamples to it, and the theory is stronger if it is assumed. The semantic account does not depend on assuming that the principle holds universally.



646 TERENCE PARSONS

in x is like what is common for things of which y is a typical representative. If I have a very large dog and a horse, I might say that the dog resembles the horse (because of its size) without judging that the horse resembles the dog. (The horse might be typical, and not doglike in any striking way.)

Even if we always judged that x resembles y when we judge that y resembles x, this would not necessarily result in an identification of their states. It is possible for x to be in a state of resembling y and y in a state of resembling x without the states being the same. Entity x is in the first state, which is of y, and y is in the second state, which is of x. So even if resemble is symmetric, the theory is not thereby refuted.

However, there are cases of deeper symmetry. Suppose that some water and alcohol are mixed, so that the water is mixed with the alcohol and the alcohol is mixed with the water; are these two states or one (or three)?20 I suggest that a verb such as mix cannot apply meaningfully to a single thing; it applies only to a group of things (including a two- membered group of quantities of fluid).2" If the water and the alcohol are mixed, then the entity "the water and the alcohol" is in a certain state, a state of being mixed. The pair, consisting of the water and the alcohol, bears the usual In-ness relation to this state. A sentence of the form x is mixed with y must then exemplify Fillmore's (1968) "displaced subject" phenomenon: the object of with is a displaced conjunct on the subject. So the semantics of x is mixed with y should be the same as the semantics of the more basic form x and y are mixed. (There may also be other readings of x Verbs with y, but this is the one that raises the puzzle about thematic roles.) The displaced subject phenomenon is a challenge to formulate in detail, but I do not see it as intractable. Another example of this is

Line A parallels line B

(again from Dowty 1989:107). This may also be a disguised group reading; this is made plausible by the paraphrase

Lines A and B are parallel.

Then we would see the apparent exception

Line A is parallel to line B

as another example of Fillmore's displaced subject phenomenon. This seems on a par with other terms, such as perpendicular, which has no singular-subject form as a verb.

I do not have a neat analysis of the displaced subject phenomenon, and there may not be a single solution. In the case of parallel we can distinguish the adjective from the verb and build the solution into the lexical entry for the adjective; the verb is an instance

20 Cases like this arise with event verbs too. There is Fillmore's example: if John and Mary walk home, then John walks home with Mary, and Mary with John. How many events are these?

21 This is Dowty's (1989) solution to a similar case. I do not know whether he would agree with this application.




of group predication and can presumably be handled by a good account of group readings. But more work needs to be done here.

2 Adjuncts and Arguments of Nouns and Verbs

Dowty (1989) suggests that verbs combine differently with their adjuncts than with their arguments, but nouns treat their arguments and adjuncts the same. He proposes that the semantic representations of nouns and verbs should reflect those differences. I agree with these observations. I do not see them as contravening the theory I have sketched. But that takes some explanation, since Dowty (1989:84) appears to suggest otherwise, and Hornstein (1993) sees this as a problem for the theory I have proposed.22

The principal datum that Dowty relies on is that verbs cannot appear without their arguments, but nouns can. He notes that we cannot remove the direct object of

He devoured his lunch

and have a well-formed English sentence, but any of the arguments can be removed from

the gift of a book from John to Mary

and we retain a well-formed NP. I agree (with minor qualifications) with these observations about the syntactic behavior of nouns and verbs.23 The issue is how to make them mesh with the appeal to events and states.

2.1 Verbs

Dowty proposes to handle the facts about verbs as follows. First, he proposes that each verb be represented by an n + I place relation, where the first place of the relation is for an event, and the other n places are for the entities denoted by the verb's arguments. For example, he would represent the sentence

Brutus stabbed Caesar

by the formula

(3e)[S(e,Brutus,Caesar)],

22 Dowty's suggestion needs to be read in context. His argument is conditional on the existence of a robust theory of thematic roles, and he is skeptical about this.

23 This proposal may require some qualification. Grimshaw (1990) claims that there is a class of verbal nouns that do not manifest the optionality that Dowty suggests. For example, although we have the results Dowty gives for gift, we cannot remove of the city from the enemy's destruction of the city. Grimshaw suggests that Dowty's complete optionality holds only for root-generated nouns that are etymologically related to verbs and that are often homonymous with nouns for which arguments are not always optional. If she is right, then Dowty's proposal needs to be limited to nouns that are fairly independent of their related verbs. This does not to my mind destroy the import of Dowty's proposal. Indeed, it may even strengthen his claim, since it limits his assertions about noun behavior to the most nounlike, least verblike, nouns. I will proceed with this sort of restriction in the background.



648 TERENCE PARSONS

where the verb contributes the three-place relation

S(e,x,y),

meaning that e is a stabbing by x of y. Additional adjuncts he proposes to append as conjuncts to the basic verb predicate, so

Brutus stabbed Caesar violently in the back

would be represented by

(3e)[S(e,Brutus,Caesar) & Violent(e) & In(e,back)].

This is essentially the proposal made by Davidson (1967), fleshed out with a proposal about how to tell which places in the sentence are incorporated into the basic predicate along with the verb, and which appear as additional conjuncts. The proposal is that arguments be amalgamated into the verbal predicate and that adjuncts appear as independent predicates in additional conjuncts.24 So the example just given supposes that the subject and direct object of the displayed sentence are arguments and that the object of the preposition in is an adjunct. Optional modifiers such as violently that have no NP places also appear as additional conjuncts.

This is an alternative to what Dowty calls the neo-Davidsonian policy of symbolizing both arguments and adjuncts in the same way, using thematic relations for the arguments and nonthematic relations of the same semantic form for adjuncts. (I advocated this option above.) On this alternative, a (noncausative) verb always contributes a one-place predicate, such as e is a stabbing, and the whole sentence is represented as

(3e)[e is a stabbing & Agent(e,Brutus) & Theme(e,Caesar) & Violent(e) & In(e,back)].

Dowty's alternative avoids some of the issues discussed earlier about the choice of, and identity of, thematic relations. Since most such relations are amalgamated into the primitive representation of the verb, and cannot be separated from the meaning of the verb itself, the issue of classifying them into Theme, Goal, and so on, does not arise. The proposal needs only to be supplemented by some way of deciding which things are arguments of the verb and which are merely adjuncts, and of deciding which places of the verb predicate are correlated with which arguments of the verb.25

24 Davidson's own proposal (Davidson 1985) is different. He proposes (p. 233) that an NP place be incorporated into the basic predicate if it is needed "to validate all inferences you consider due to logical form." This makes the answer depend on what we expect of logical form. If we want logical form to entail all necessary consequences of the sentence involving its parts, then the implementation will be different from Dowty's: since one cannot eat without eating somewhere, there must be a "Locative" position in the basic predicate for eat, and since one can stab and miss, there must not be a "Theme" place in the basic predicate for stab. If we do not expect logical forms to entail all necessary consequences of their sentences, then there will be fewer places in the basic predicate.

25 I do not mean to minimize the difficulty of distinguishing arguments from adjuncts, and optional arguments from obligatory ones. Discussion of the alternatives presumes that some such distinction can be made. If there is no such distinction, then Dowty's proposal cannot be formulated, and the option that I prefer remains viable. But I do not presume this.




The alternatives under discussion differ with respect to how they handle missing arguments. On Dowty's proposal, when one of the arguments is missing from the sentence, its place in logical notation is to be existentially quantified. Thus,

Caesar was stabbed in the back

receives essentially the meaning of

Caesar was stabbed in the back by someone/thing,

by existentially quantifying the syntactically empty place:

(3e)[(3x)[S(e,x,Caesar)] & In(e,back)].

On the alternative I favor, the missing argument is (usually)26 simply missing from the semantic representation:

(3e)[e is a stabbing & Theme(e,Caesar) & In(e,back)].

This analysis is not forced by the theory. If you think that when a verb is used without one of its usual arguments, it has the meaning of the form with an implicit argument something, then you can include the appropriate clause and existentially quantify it. This would give Caesar was stabbed in the back the form

(3e)[e is a stabbing & (3x)Agent(e,x) & Theme(e,Caesar) & In(e,back)].

The neo-Davidsonian approach lets you analyze missing arguments in either way, whereas Dowty's approach requires the implicit "something" analysis. I will argue below against the implicit "something" analysis; and if I am right, this is an indirect argument in favor of the neo-Davidsonian approach. If I am wrong, we have not yet seen any reason to prefer either approach to the other.

2.2 Nouns

Dowty's treatment of nouns is different. Because nouns can appear either with or without their arguments, he suggests that they be symbolized in the way the neo-Davidsonian alternative handles verbs. Thus, the representation of

a righteous destruction of the city by God ...

should have the form

(3e)[Destruction(e) & Theme(e,city) & Agent(e,God) & Righteous(e) & . ..

Then, when arguments are missing in the syntax, they are also missing in the semantics,

26 This is not true for every case. For example, accept can appear without its direct object in certain special circumstances in which the identity of the object is identifiable from context. For a sentence such as She accepted, one should first identify the implicit direct object and then give the sentence the semantics of the sentence that results from adding the direct object. This is clearly a special case. (The case was brought to my attention by Maria Goy.)



650 TERENCE PARSONS

as with the neo-Davidsonian option for verbs. Thus,

a righteous destruction of the city ...

would be represented as

(3e)[Destruction(e) & Theme(e,city) & Righteous(e) & . ..

Verbs supposedly treat their arguments differently from their adjuncts, and nouns do not; the accounts just given parallel these differences by differences in the logical forms.

2.3 How Verbs and Nouns Combine with Arguments and Adjuncts

Dowty suggests that verbs combine with their arguments differently than they combine with their adjuncts, and they combine with their arguments differently than event nouns combine with theirs. He suggests that the neo-Davidsonian theory that I favor has as a drawback that it does not reflect these differences. I think this suggestion is misleading. The right thing to say about the theory as I have presented it here and in Parsons 1990 is that it does not yet address these differences. This is because it is a proposal for the logical forms of sentences, unsupplemented by an account of how those forms originate by combining sentence parts.27 The logical forms discussed above (on either account) are the forms associated with whole sentences, and the mechanisms for producing the forms are not implicit in the forms themselves. In particular, they contain no clue to exactly how much of the form comes from the verb and how much from the noun, and what additional manipulations are involved in getting from the forms of the sentence parts to the forms of the whole. This is true on either Dowty's account or the neo- Davidsonian one; more work is needed to give the principles of semantic combination of parts and whole. Neither of the proposals for logical forms of completed sentences carries with it any commitment to how verbs and nouns combine with their arguments and modifiers.

How, then, can those forms be produced? Suppose that one accepts the differences that Dowty sees, and wants to reflect them in the differences between nouns and verbs. Here is a natural way to do this on the neo-Davidsonian approach.

We need some general theory of semantics within which to work, and there is none that meets with universal approbation. So take the following to be an example, offered in the spirit of a hypothesis, and seen as a generalization of actual practice in various branches of semantics. I propose two principles about how heads combine with their arguments and their modifiers:

PI: The logical forms associated with heads are functional expressions whose argument places have the semantic types of their obligatory arguments. When a head is

27 I may appear to have said otherwise, when I wrote (Parsons 1990:17), ". . . nominal gerunds contribute the very same predicates to logical form as the verbs on which they are based." This was a misleading thing for me to say, because although it says something that I endorse, it suggests something else, something that I was not thinking about in the context of the introductory discussion where I said it. In the logical forms of sentences containing nouns and verbs, certain simple predicates occur flanked by an event variable, and I meant that these predicates are the same. This does not mean that the whole contributions of verbs and nouns to logical forms must be identical. If I (unintentionally) said otherwise, I was wrong, and I hereby retract it.




combined with its obligatory arguments, the logical form associated with the result- ing complex expression is the "function-argument" one got by placing the forms associated with the arguments of the head in the argument places of the logical form associated with the head itself.

P2: The logical forms associated with optional arguments and adjuncts are of the same semantic types as the forms of the phrases that they modify. The logical form of their combination with the head plus its arguments is the "lambda-conjunction" of those parts, where the lambda-conjunction of a and a is Ax[ox(x) & f(x)].28

To apply these principles, I assume that verbs and the nouns that are derived from them share a basic predicate of events or states. For example, the verb destroy and the nouns destroying and destruction each have associated with them a one-place predicate D meaning 'is a destroying'. But this predicate will be associated with the verb and the noun in different ways. This is a consequence of the principles P1 and P2, conjoined with the hypothesis that nouns have no obligatory arguments, but that verbs do. The details can be cumbersome, but an illustration should suffice:

Consider a transitive use of the verb destroy. To get the forms suggested in earlier sections in accord with the principles just given, the form associated with a transitive occurrence of the verb29 should be

XxXyXe[D(e) & Agent(e,x) & Theme(e,y)].

I assume that the sentence God destroyed the city with a lightning bolt has two arguments (God and the city) and one adjunct (with the bolt).30 Combining the verb representation with that of the arguments yields the function-argument form

God destroyed the city

XxXyXe[D(e) & Agent(e,x) & Theme(e,y)] (God) (city)

FUNCTION ARG ARG

28 It is common to take the logical form of a modifier to have the type of a function from things of type ot to things of type ot, where a is the type of what is modified. In practice, the modifier often turns out to have more detail, and the detail looks like what I have specified as lambda-conjunction. I think that lambda-conjunction applies more widely than is generally thought, but this is not essential to anything I am arguing here. Those who prefer the more general analysis of modifiers can treat my P2 as a special case of the general form that is relevant to the cases I am discussing. This is derived from the general form by taking the modifier as having the form

XP[Xe[P(e) & ,B(e)]], and then applying this to the thing modified. If the thing modified is symbolized as a, the result is the same as that given in P2. (For more discussion of this point see Parsons 1990, or section 4.1 of Dowty 1989.)

29 Intransitive occurrences of verbs or passives of transitives contribute different complexes to logical form. For example, on my preferred treatment of optionality, the verb destroy in The city was destroyed is

Xyke[D(e) & Theme(e,y)], whereas on Dowty's preferred treatment it is

Xyke[D(e) & (3x)[Agent(e,x)] & Theme(e,y)]. Optionality is discussed in section 2.6.

30 I assume here that the subject is an argument of the verb. If we assume that it is not, it must be treated



652 TERENCE PARSONS

which, after lambda elimination, reduces to

ke[D(e) & Agent(e,God) & Theme(e,city)].

The adjunct is symbolized

XeWith(e,bolt),

and combining it with the above by P2 yields the lambda-conjunction

Xe'[Xe[D(e) & Agent(e,God) & Theme(e,city)](e') & keWith(e,bolt)(e')].

After lambda elimination, this reduces to

Ae[D(e) & Agent(e,God) & Theme(e,city) & With(e,bolt)].

Default existential quantification of the Xe then yields the form discussed earlier.3' The conjuncts originating from obligatory arguments and those originating from optional adjuncts now appear to be on a par, and this gives rise to the (misleading) appearance that there is no difference in how the arguments and adjuncts were combined with their verbs. But the arguments and adjuncts got into the sentence form by quite different means (using the mechanisms of the two different principles above). So the overall theory works as Dowty suggests it should.

Now consider the noun destruction as it is used in destruction of the city by God with a lightning bolt. Notice that destruction cannot possibly combine with its "arguments" exactly as destroy does, because it does not even have the same types of arguments. One argument of destroy is the city, but the corresponding argument of destruction is not the city, but of the city; the former is an entity type, and the latter is of the type of properties of events. Given these differences, it is hard to see how any natural theory could make nouns and verbs work in complete parallel.32

Since nouns have no obligatory arguments,33 only P2 will apply. The noun destruction has associated with it a different logical form than the verb destroy; the noun's form is simply the predicate D. The forms of its arguments are

specially. This complicates the account, but it does not raise any difficulties of principle. I also follow the custom of Parsons 1990 in pretending that NP arguments and adjuncts are namelike expressions, whereas I think that full NPs mostly occupy external quantificational position, and the actual arguments and adjuncts are their traces (as in GB Theory) or variables bound by them (as in the Montague Grammar tradition).

31 The event variable is existentially quantified by default unless it is bound by some other mechanism; see Parsons 1990 for discussion.

32 Perhaps an unnatural one could be formulated with sufficient ingenuity. Decree that the optional arguments of destruction are not of the city and by God but the city and God. Then devise principles of combination for nouns and verbs that yield parallel logical forms, but that work syntactically by inserting prepositions in front of the noun's arguments. Finally, decree that the inserted prepositions are unimportant. The result is a theory that treats nouns and verbs "the same." It should be clear that I have said nothing to dispute the possibility of giving a theory of this sort. It should be equally clear that this approach is not forced on us.

3 Again, this is Dowty's view, which I adopt here for the sake of argument. Recall Grimshaw's point from footnote 23, that this may not be true of nouns that are closely tied to their verbal roots. But that sort of exception is not relevant to the present discussion.




of the city AeTheme(e,city) by God AeAgent(e,God) with the bolt XeWith(e,bolt).

Applying P2 and then using lambda elimination yields

Ae[D(e) & Agent(e,God) & Theme(e,city) & With(e,bolt)].

This is the same form associated with the verb and its arguments and adjuncts prior to quantification. But it has been arrived at in a completely different way.

In summary: There must be some tight relationship between the form associated with God destroyed the city with a lightning bolt and a destruction of the city by God with a lightning bolt, since these are logically interderivable. The theory yields this. This tight relationship is consistent with the view that verbs combine differently with their arguments than with their adjuncts, and that verbs combine differently with their arguments than nouns do with their corresponding arguments. Indeed, on the account given above, the tight relationship between the verb form and the noun form is a consequence of an account that is based on these differences in functioning between verbs and nouns.

I assume for the rest of this article that some account like the one just sketched lies behind the scenes. I concentrate hereafter on a comparison of Dowty's approach with the neo-Davidsonian one with respect to semantic issues about the logical forms of sentences, irrespective of the means of arriving at them.

2.4 The Logic of Verb Modifiers and Perception Verbs

There are several different reasons to posit underlying events and states in logical forms. This section reviews two ways in which Dowty's proposal and the neo-Davidsonian one respond equivalently to certain important data. (This section may be skipped without loss of continuity.)

First, both approaches adequately handle a phenomenon concerning the logic of modifiers. An example is the fact that

Brutus stabbed Caesar in the back with a knife

entails both

Brutus stabbed Caesar in the back Brutus stabbed Caesar with a knife,

and each of these in turn entails

Brutus stabbed Caesar.

Equally important is that the conjunction of the center two sentences does not entail the first. This is because there could have been two stabbings, one in the back with an icepick and the other in the thigh with a knife, without there being any stabbing in the back with a knife.



654 TERENCE PARSONS

Both proposals get this right, and in the same way. The neo-Davidsonian one proposes the logical forms

(3e)[Stabbing(e) & Agent(e,B) & Theme(e,C) & In(e,back) & With(e,knife)] (3e)[Stabbing(e) & Agent(e,B) & Theme(e,C) & In(e,back)] (3e)[Stabbing(e) & Agent(e,B) & Theme(e,C) & With(e,knife)] (3e)[Stabbing(e) & Agent(e,B) & Theme(e,C)].

These yield the connections and lacks of connections indicated above. Dowty's account differs from this only in using

S(e,B,C)

in place of the former account's

Stabbing(e) & Agent(e,B) & Theme(e,C)

throughout. The proposals differ, however, on how to treat a related phenomenon involving

nonmodifiers. Consider the four-part pattern

Fred sold Mary the car Fred sold to Mary Fred sold the car Fred sold.

Here the inference pattern is the same as that above, and the neo-Davidsonian treatment would be the same:

(3e)[Selling(e) & Agent(e,Fred) & Theme(e,car) & Goal(e,Mary)] (3e)[Selling(e) & Agent(e,Fred) & Goal(e,Mary)] (3e)[Selling(e) & Agent(e,Fred) & Theme(e,car)] (3e)[Selling(e) & Agent(e,Fred)].

But Dowty's approach would instead yield

(3e)S(e,Fred,Mary,car) (3e)(3x)S(e,Fred,Mary,x) (3e)(3y)S(e,Fred,y,car) (3e)(3x)(By)S(e,Fred,y,x).

It is noteworthy that these quite different approaches get the inference patterns exactly right. So far, this gives us no way to choose between them.

They are also on a par when it comes to the treatment of perception verbs. Given a sentence like

Mary saw Brutus stab Caesar,




we have the option on either approach to treat the seeing as a seeing by Mary of an event, the event picked out by the embedded Brutus stab Caesar.

The third well-known piece of evidence for an appeal to underlying events is to explain the connections between verbs and their gerundive nouns: for example, between the verb stab and the noun stabbing. Here, the accounts differ, and this will be discussed in the next section.

2.5 Thematic Relations

Although verbs and nouns are symbolized differently, there are important equivalences between them. One pattern of equivalence is illustrated by

Brutus violently stabbed Caesar - A violent stabbing of Caesar by Brutus occurred.

There are a wide range of equivalences of this sort; they interrelate the meanings of verbs, nouns, and their arguments and modifiers. In my opinion, these equivalences provide the best evidence there is for the reality of thematic relations in natural language. This evidence is laid out in Parsons 1990; some of it will be illustrated below.

Reflection on these examples suggests that the many-place predicates that Dowty associates with verbs are always equivalent to the conjunctions that he associates with nouns. For example, the following are universally equivalent:34

S(e,x,y) Stabbing(e) & Agent(e,x) & Theme(e,y).

This suggests that one form is analyzable in terms of the other. There are two natural ways to do this.

Way 1: In the first way we imagine that the many-place predicates associated with verbs are to be defined in terms of the conjunctions associated with the corresponding nouns when these are supplemented with the same arguments.

The equivalence displayed above can then be read as a definition of S in terms of Stab- bing, Agent, and Theme.

This proposal brings the two alternatives quite close together, making both of them methodologically dependent on the use of thematic relations. The only important difference between them, then, appears to be in the treatment of verbs with missing arguments. For example, whereas the neo-Davidsonian treatment would symbolize Caesar was stabbed by

(3e)[Stabbing(e) & Theme(e,Caesar)],

Dowty's treatment would include the missing argument and then generalize it away:

(3e)[Stabbing(e) & Theme(e,Caesar) & (3x)[Agent(e,x)]].

34 Dowty accepts this sort of equivalence only conditional on the coherence of a robust theory of thematic roles; he has qualms about whether there is such a theory.



656 TERENCE PARSONS

As a result, Dowty's treatment would often build into the logical forms of simple sentences some knowledge that is shared by language users, for example, knowledge that if someone eats, then that person eats something. The neo-Davidsonian alternative would not do this. Dowty's proposal would include the final conjunct on this analysis of Alice ate,

(3e)[Eating(e) & Agent(e,Alice) & (3x)[Theme(e,x)]],

whereas the neo-Davidsonian analysis would just leave it off. Dowty's proposal does not always yield correct results, since sometimes syntacti-

cally optional verb arguments are also semantically optional. She stabbed, but she missed does not require that she actually stabbed something, and so the symbolization of Alice stabbed cannot be

(3e)[Stabbing(e) & Agent(e,Alice) & (3x)[Theme(e,x)]],

though it can be the simpler neo-Davidsonian

(3e)[Stabbing(e) & Agent(e,Alice)].

This example is similar to one provided by Carlson (1984) using kick. If I understand him rightly, Dowty suggests that this phenomenon, though real, is rare, occurring only for a small number of verbs. This suggests that what we have here are special cases, to be handled in some appropriately special way.

Way 2: On this variant we take the many-place predicate as basic and use it to analyze the apparent thematic relations.

For the noun symbolization itself this is easy. For example,

e is a stabbing

is analyzed as 'e is a stabbing of something by someone':

(3y)(3z)S(e ,y ,z) .

The thematic relations themselves are now relativized to each verb. We no longer have a general notion of Agenthood, but only Agent-of-a-stabbing, Agent-of-an-eating, and so on. The notion "x is Agent of the stabbing e" is defined as

AgentSTABBING(e,x) =df (3y)S(e,x,y).

As far as optionality is concerned, this proposal yields a treatment of nouns that is similar to that for verbs, thereby undercutting somewhat the spirit of the nouns-are- different-from-verbs approach. Here is why. Suppose that we symbolize A stabbing of Caesar occurred as

(3e)[Stabbing(e) & Theme(e,Caesar)].

This appears to be neutral about an Agent. But once the terminology is replaced by its




definitions, we see that the symbolization is actually

(3e)[(3y)(3z)S(e,y,z) & (3y)S(e,y,Caesar)].

This says that e is a stabbing of something by someone, and a stabbing of Caesar by someone. By the definition of Agenthood, this entails that the stabbing had an Agent. So the semantic optionality of arguments of nouns is at the surface only.

There remains the difference that Way 2 is independent of the need to appeal to primitive thematic relations. This is one of its methodological strengths. But it is also a potential downfall; for there are contexts in which the relations needed for analyzing a sentence are not recoverable from context, and Way 2 has no apparent means of dealing with them.

Consider how we are to analyze the following four kinds of sentences:

(1) Every stabbing by a villain was violent.

(2) a. Every stabbing was by a villain. b. The destruction of the city was apparently by the barbarians. c. The carpet was sold or given to Martha.

(3) The stabbing was violent. It was by a villain.

(4) a. I don't know if that car was sold, given, imposed, or what. But whatever it was, it was to Martha, not to you; so stop sniveling.

b. Everything evil done in the city that day was done by the barbarians.

In (1) the by clause is in recognizable argument position, and so there is no difficulty in recognizing the Agent relation as the Agent-of-a-stabbing relation. The variable contrib- uted by a villain then appears in the second place of the three-place relation that repre- sents the noun stabbing. In (2a-c) we need to take account of context to figure this out. This is not difficult in the examples given, but it is not clear how to accomplish this in a principled way, and compositionality is thereby threatened. This problem escalates in (3), where we need to look across sentences to find an antecedent, and then interpret the predicate of the later sentence based on information in the earlier one. Examples (4a-b) carry this phenomenon to the extreme: there appears to be no way in (4b) to reconstruct which many-place predicate to use.35 It thus appears that autonomous thematic relations are needed after all.36 This returns us to Way 1, which differs from the neo-Davidsonian treatment only where optionality is concerned.

35 I assume that this sentence entails that if there was an evil stabbing, then the stabbing was by a barbarian. Thus, it will not suffice to construe do as a regular verb with semantic thematic relations of its own, for then the Agent relation that goes with do would be AgentDO, and the inference to AgentsTAB would be fallacious.

36 This is not necessarily incompatible with Dowty's account. He suggests that thematic relations of autonomous form might be definable in terms of their verb-parasitic forms, something like

Agent(e,x) =df (3V)[... V ... & (3y)V(e,x,y)], where . . . V . . . is some appropriate condition on the choice of V.



658 TERENCE PARSONS

I have one reservation about the reasoning just given. It is persuasive for the cases surveyed, but I have given no examples to illustrate the autonomy of the role of Theme. I do not know of any. Traditionally, this is the role that has proven most difficult to characterize. (In section 1 it was defined in terms of the preposition of, which is famous for its lack of intuitive content.) If there is a compelling reason to construe Themes in terms of relations between individuals and events (or states), then it must lie elsewhere (perhaps in the area of optionality of Themes).

2.6 Optionality

The point of this section is to assess Dowty's claim that verbs do, whereas nouns do not, require existential quantification over their syntactically missing argument places in logical form. I think that neither verbs nor nouns do this, and I need to say why. (None of the previous discussion depends on this in any way.)

What should be included in the logical forms of English sentences? This question becomes salient when we realize that a standard way of answering it is not generally adequate. In particular, it is not generally true that necessary consequences of a sentence should be reflected in its logical form. The following guideline is incorrect in many cases:

If Necessarily, if S then T is true, then the logical form of S should logically entail that of T.

There is an old example from the philosophical tradition, often proposed as a stumbling block for the goals of logical positivism, that illustrates this: It is a necessary truth that everything that is colored is extended, but it is not plausible to try to find terminology to associate with colored and extended so that this necessary truth turns out to be a logical truth. The project of making all necessary truths into logical truths is also known to fail because of Godel's Theorem; the truths of arithmetic are necessary, but no way of assigning logical forms to arithmetical sentences (either symbolic, or in English) will generate all of the necessary connections.

Dowty agrees that not all necessities are to be reflected in logical forms. He gives the following example: dine, eat, and devour all require for their implementation that something be eaten, yet the verb dine has no argument place for what is eaten, eat has one that is syntactically optional, and devour has one that is required. On Dowty's proposal, that means that although it is necessary that if x dines, then x dines on something, this necessity is not to be reflected in the logical form of x dines. And there are plenty of cases of adjuncts that are semantically required but that are not arguments; these are not to be built into the logical forms.

If we have given up necessary consequence as a criterion of what is to be included in logical form, why should we include in the logical forms of verbs clauses that require the existence of a thing playing the role of some argument? I can think of no reason. It does not explain the differences in behavior of nouns and verbs, since verbs and nouns are on a par as regards the necessity of their role's being implicitly or explicitly fulfilled.




Can I think of a reason to take the other tack? Yes, though the argument is not a conclusive one. The other tack is that in the case of both verbs and nouns, when an argument or adjunct is missing in the syntax, its conjunct is missing in the logical form as well. We then explain certain necessary consequences of sentences in terms of the combinations of those sentences with certain well-known general necessary truths. An example of such a general truth is

Necessarily, in every eating something is eaten,

symbolically:

O(e)[Eating(e) -* (3y)[Theme(e,y)]].

This principle then lets us infer the logical form of Something was eaten from Someone ate. Similar generalizations are true of many, perhaps most, verbs, for some or all of their argument/adjunct places. Every selling requires an Agent, a Goal, a Theme, and a Location. Every stabbing requires an Agent, an Instrument, and a Location, though not necessarily a Theme. And so on. Specifying these generalizations is an enterprise in metaphysics, not in linguistics, for the topic is not logical forms, it is metaphysical generalizations. (It may be an exercise in psycholinguistics if learning such generalizations is an essential part of learning the language. It is also important for theories of knowledge representation.)

Why take this route rather than building the meaning of ate something into ate? Because we need to make sense of claims in which necessity itself is at issue. The simplest illustration is a claim like this:

Necessarily, whenever x eats, x eats something.

This makes a substantive point. The point is lost if the logical form associated with the sentence contains an existentially quantified direct object place in the antecedent clause. For then the substantive principle has the force of

Necessarily, whenever x eats something, x eats something.

This just doesn't say the same. If the former claim is true, then the latter one is necessarily equivalent to it, but that does not indicate that they mean the same.

Here is another example, more roundabout, but, I think, compelling. Consider this criticism of Descartes's famous "cogito" argument. Recall that Descartes asked what he could know about the world if he began by rejecting everything that is dubitable. His famous claim is that he could not doubt "I am thinking," and this led him to the knowledge that he existed. Nietzsche responded with this criticism: All that you know beyond doubt is that there is some thinking. It is an inference from this that the thinking is by someone/thing, and an additional inference from that that the thing that is thinking is you.

Now suppose we try to capture Nietzsche's criticisms using Dowty's recommended



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forms. When Nietzsche grants Descartes that there is thinking, the logical form of this is

(3e)[Thinking(e)] .

Then Nietzsche is apparently right on Way 1 (though not on Way 2). But Descartes can escape this criticism. All that he needs to do is to use a verb instead of a noun. That is tricky, since think is intransitive, and there appears to be no grammatical way to state that thinking is occurring using the verb without a subject. So some ingenuity is called for. Suppose that Descartes claims that he isn't just thinking, he is thinking about God. (To make this seem indubitable, suppose that God occurs here de dicto.) Then Nietzsche's criticism would be that Descartes is certain that God is thought about, but not that someone/thing is thinking about God. The point appears to be the same. But Dowty's logical form now sides with Descartes (on either Way 1 or Way 2); for his account of the logical form of

It is indubitable that God is thought about

is not

Indubitable: (3e)[Thinking(e) & Theme(e,God)]

but rather

Indubitable: (3e)[Thinking(e) & Theme(e,God) & (3x)[Agent(e,x)]].

So Nietzsche loses. But that is implausible. His point is a pertinent one, and semantic theory ought not to take it from him. It certainly ought not to turn on the difference between nouns and verbs. Both of the claims

There is thinking about God God is being thought about

are on a par with respect to whether or not they require a thinker, and Descartes should not be right or wrong depending on whether or not he is cagy enough to pick the former rather than the latter. My inclination is to side with Nietzsche: it may be a necessary truth that there is no thinking without a thinker, but neither of the above sentences says so.

2.7 Anaphora

Some have argued that there is other evidence in favor of representing "missing" arguments in logical forms, evidence involving the need for pronominal antecedents. Consider a simple discourse like the following:

I ate. It was scrumptious.




What is the antecedent for the it? Obviously, the "missing" direct object of ate. Similar examples suggest the presence in logical form of missing Agents, Sources, Goals:

A car was stolen. They later abandoned it. We bought a car. He gave us a good deal. We sold a car. She paid cash.

It is easy to find plenty of evidence of this kind for all sorts of missing arguments. Too easy, perhaps. First, if the evidence is good, it seems to show that there are

missing arguments of nouns too:

There was a theft of a car this morning. They later returned it. The purchase went nicely. He gave us a good deal. The sale was solid. She paid cash.

Also, what gets in are not just obligatory arguments, but also a host of things that do not necessarily correspond to anyone's notion of argument. We have:

She stabbed him gruesomely. It was a stiletto that her uncle had let her have. We went to a party. They served margaritas. We bought doughnuts. He makes them without sugar.

It appears that pronouns can look back to any distinctive entity that is normally thought to be involved in the situation picked out by the verb. Arguments typically target such distinctive entities, and this makes it look as if they are present, but this is a gratuitous inference.

References

Carlson, Greg. 1984. On the role of thematic roles in linguistic theory. Linguistics 22:259-279. Davidson, Donald. 1967. The logical form of action sentences. In The logic of decision and action,

ed. Nicholas Rescher, 81-95. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press. Davidson, Donald. 1985. Adverbs of action. In Essays on Davidson: Actions and events, ed. Bruce

Vermazen and Merrill B. Hintikka, 230-241. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dowty, David. 1989. On the semantic content of the notion of "thematic role." In Properties,

types, and meaning, ed. Gennaro Chierchia, Barbara Hall Partee, and Raymond Turner, 69-129. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Fillmore, Charles. 1968. The case for case. In Universals in linguistic theory, ed. Emmon Bach and Robert Harms, 1-88. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Grimshaw, Jane. 1990. Argument structure. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Haegeman, Liliane. 1991. Introduction to Government and Binding Theory. Cambridge, Mass.:

Blackwell. Higginbotham, James. 1989. Elucidations of meaning. Linguistics and Philosophy 12:465-517. Hornstein, Norbert. 1993. Review of Terence Parsons, Events in the semantics of English. Mind

and Language 8:442-449. Jackendoff, Ray. 1990. Semantic structures. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.



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Ladusaw, William, and David Dowty. 1988. Toward a nongrammatical account of thematic roles. In Thematic relations, ed. Wendy W. Wilkins, 61-73. San Diego, Calif.: Academic Press.

Parsons, Terence. 1990. Events in the semantics of English. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Rizzi, Luigi. 1990. Relativized Minimality. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Philosophy Department University of California Irvine, California 92717

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thematic relations and arguments

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