Bill,

Very well put.  There is, of course, a fairly large body of terminology on which there is at least wide-spread understanding, if not agreement.  Much of that terminology we use regularly in our discussions and our classes.  Like you, I don't like the term "underlying," but sometimes it's useful to draw on a term whose theoretical implications one doesn't accept.

Your point that we don't have similarly widely accepted terms for participant roles, or even a wide-spread agreement that we need such things, points to the reason why our grammatical terminology is a limited as it is.  It's pretty much restricted to those parts of a sentence that can be defined morphosyntactically, a practice that's been with us in English at least since the 16th c.  It's grounded, of course, in Greek and Latin grammar where many grammatical relations are specified by case endings.  Participant roles (agent, patient, object, instrument, etc.) aren't morphosyntactically definable in most SVO languages, although they can be in VSO languages like Samoan or SOV languages like Japanese.  It's not difficult to define these roles in pedagogically useful ways, and perhaps this is one of the more obvious additions that could be made to the grammar that we teach.

As to ways around terms like "underlying," traditional school grammar has long used "understood subject," and it wouldn't be much of a stretch to use "understood object" with verbs like "eat" and "drink" and with "tough"-movement constructions like "John is tough to please."

If we then add to this semantic role terminology some of the functional concepts Craig has talked about, we might have a useful, reasonably descriptive, and theory-neutral body of terminology and concepts to teach our students.

Herb

Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN  47306
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________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Spruiell, William C [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: December 2, 2008 9:36 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Correct?

Dear All:

I suspect that one of the reasons that many modern grammars use what seem to be simplistic structural pattern definitions (e.g. [S V DO INF] for both “We wanted him to be hired” and “We wanted him to go home”) is that the differences among those sentences are differences in what the various participants are doing – the relationships among them – and we don’t really have a theoretically agnostic way of talking about that. The minute a term like “underlying subject” is used, the description is locked into a particular model.

This is true of all descriptions, of course (simply by using a label like “infinitive,” I’ve committed to a kind of model), but cases like these bring up major points of contention among current models. Almost everyone who works on English is happy with the term “infinitive,” but there is nowhere near the same level of consensus  about the idea that infinitives are really, truly, made out of full sentences, etc. I have a knee-jerk reaction the minute I see a phrase like “underlying subject,” and I’m sure I use phrases that others on the list would have an immediate negative reaction to as well.  One way authors of grammar books can try to dodge the entire issue is simply to omit any references to this type of material at all, and thus we end up with [S V DO INF].

Older grammars, like the ones Herb mentions, did something that I think we can still do: we can all agree that there are different patterns of relationships among the participants, even if we don’t agree on why those differences exist. To some extent, the differences among the patterns can be “anchored” by relating them to native-speaker reactions to questions about implications of the structure (e.g. “If I say that ‘X V-ed Y to Z’ am I saying that it’s Y who will be doing the Z-ing?”).  In other words, we can adopt ways to probe for differences that there will be wide consensus on, even if there is no such consensus on what the differences mean for a theory of linguistic structure (this is what I’m trying to get at with the term “theoretically agnostic”).

Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University

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