Sophie Johnson wrote:
>
> Johanna, this was very interesting reading. Thank you. But may I press one
> point a little more? I have a feeling that Fillmore's case grammar
> encourages it. In these two sentences:
>
> i We are going fishing
> ii We are going to London
>
> there is the sense that we `are going' somewhere. So an adverbial function
> of `fishing' and `to London' is operative: both the gerund and the proper
> noun reveal where `we are going'. But, especially of `to London', it is
> against the grain to say that it is an adverb, probably because of its
> proper-noun form, which is quintessentially nounal. (For me, there is more
> comfort in the term `locative noun'.) All the same, we are stuck with
> instances of nouns modifying verbs and, at least on that count, functioning
> as adverbs.
Sophie, you have very different ways of analyzing English than what I am
used to. In ii., 'to London' is a prepositional phrase acting as a
locative adverbial, i.e. in terms of form it is a prepositional phrase;
in terms of function it is a locative adverbial, not a locative noun.
'London' is the noun object of the preposition, and does not have a
direct syntactic relationship to the verb 'going'.
>That is why I should like to invite you to look at the
> possibility that a structure in which there is a locative noun is markedly
> different from, say:
>
> iii `We are hitting Mary',
>
> where the subject-object relationship is clear and `are hitting' is
> necessarily a verb.
>
> The perspective I put to you is that we do not have a verb at all in i and
> ii: There is no relationship of activity between subject and object as there
> is in iii. (The subject `we' does not perform an act of `are going' upon
> either `fishing' or `to London'). Instead, the subject's activity in each
> instant is denoted by a copular verb of which the noun-complement `fishing'
> specifies the direction/location/place.
>
Sorry, I resist the notion of 'fishing' as a location. It names an
activity, not a location. It doesn't say where we are going, it says
(with 'going') what kind of activity we are about to undertake. I find
it equivalent in meaning to 'we are going somewhere, and we will fish
there'. The activity is not the location. Note that you can add a
locative expression, e.g. 'we are going fishing in Lake Shasta' or 'we
are going shopping at the Mall of America'. 'We are going fishing' does
not specify the location of the activity.
I see verbs in all three of these sentences: we have tense-inflected
'are' in all three. It's an auxiliary verb, but nonetheless a verb.
Activity verbs may be one subclass of verbs, but something does not
cease to be a verb because it expresses something other than an
activity. A verb is any word that conventionally inflects like a verb in
a given speech community. Semantically speaking, a verb traces the
evolution of a state of affairs through time (scanning through time
being crucial here, and change or movement is not crucial--the
persistence of an unchanged state of affairs over time is also depicted
by a verb, a stative verb [such as 'resemble'].) [I should say that the
'inflects like a verb' definition comes from structural linguistics,
and the semantic definition comes from Cognitive Grammar as formulated
by R. Langacker.]
'Are' is also not a copula in any of these sentences. A copula is, by
definition, followed by a subject complement--something which either
names or describes the subject. 'Are' is an auxiliary in these
sentences, functioning with the present participle to create the present
progressive tense/aspect construction. In i., the verb 'going' is part
of the 'go Xing' construction; in ii. it is the main verb followed by a
locative adverbial expressing the destination of 'going', and in iii.
'hitting' is the main verb followed by a direct object noun phrase
comprising 'Mary'.
The structures I see are:
i. subject NP + present progressive tense/aspect + gerund (forming the
'go Xing' construction)
ii. subject NP + present progressive tense/aspect + locative adverbial
in the form of a prepositional phrase
iii. Subject NP + present progressive tense/aspect + direct object NP
I think most listers would agree with _most_ of the syntactic
description I give here.
Fillmore has moved on from Case Grammar to Construction Grammar. I don't
know how case works in Constr. Grammar, but I imagine the Goldberg
thesis I cited yesterday must have a lot to say on the subject, since
case and argument structure are so closely related (cases being the
roles various arguments of a verb take up in a clause [and yes I believe
in clauses]).
So there's my opinion! Thanks for asking!
Johanna
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Johanna Rubba Associate Professor, Linguistics
English Department, California Polytechnic State University
One Grand Avenue • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. (805)-756-2184 • Fax: (805)-756-6374 • Dept. Phone. 756-2596
• E-mail: [log in to unmask] • Home page: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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