zompist bboard

We are familiar with the concept of a verb giving thematic roles to their arguments. I don't know if "giving" is the right term, but I'm sticking with it because of reasons. Well, we can say that a verb has theta roles to give to its arguments in various ways. To say "Susan loves Bob", that's Susan and Bob, the subject and the object, the patient and the theme. The patient role is being given to the subject, and the theme role to the object. (Of course, this language has facilities to move these around a bit, passive, medial etc etc.)

Can we say that nouns have essentially the same thing? Except then we don't deal with subjects and object, but rather with possessives, and prepositional phrases and other such things. "Susan's love for Bob" really is the same relation as above, except it's expressed nominally. We could say that the noun gives the theme role to the PP introduced by "for" (except for time phrases and maybe other things), and the patient role is given to the nearby possessive NP.

As for situations like "the love Susan has for Bob"; love here is a noun but I don't consider that it has a theta role at all, since "love" is the element that the is expressing the real-world relationship, regardless of the part-of-speech.

Some examples from Ojibwe I thought were quite neat:
dibākonigewin judgement (from the standpoint of the person who judges)
dibākonigowin judgement (from the standpoint of the person is being judged)
You can find these examples in Outline for a Comparative Grammar of some Algonquian Languages.
These really are nouns formed from the same verb, but the verb's voice is still obvious. (In English, to disambiguate, we would need to say something like "his judgement of me" or something).

Am I completely off the rails here? In my syntax class (it was ages ago and in a language I didn't really speak that well) I think they only spoke of verbs giving thematic roles out.

(And why is it "love for", but "judgement of"?)

We are familiar with the concept of a verb giving thematic roles to their arguments. I don't know if "giving" is the right term, but I'm sticking with it because of reasons. Well, we can say that a verb has theta roles to give to its arguments in various ways. To say "Susan loves Bob", that's Susan and Bob, the subject and the object, the patient and the theme. The patient role is being given to the subject, and the theme role to the object. (Of course, this language has facilities to move these around a bit, passive, medial etc etc.)

I would not call them patient and theme. I would call them experiencer and patient/recipient. The theme would be 'love' itself.

I don't understand what you're trying to say in the rest. Yes, adpositions add meaning to nouns, if that's what you're getting at.

(And why is it "love for", but "judgement of"?)

Because it is.

So, as I understand theta roles, they are semantic relations. So a "word" (whatever that is) can have 0 or more theta roles which it "must" (perhaps optional) assign to other words.

So of course, there are words with 0 (like weather words), 1 (most intransitive verbs), 2 (transitive verbs), 3 (ditransitive verbs), maybe more.

Can nouns (or adjectives) assign theta roles? I don't see why not. How the assignment happens is a little less clear as now we move to syntax. But especially for nouns and adjectives that are clearly related to verbs I think the theta roles may exist.

Most nouns would have 0 theta roles ('rock' e.g.), but others might have more...

So yeah, possessives so to speak can act like subject roles (or object roles sometimes...) adpositions seem to stand in for a variety of roles and are indeed required in many languages for more oblique roles.

/ramble...

Thematic and theta roles are different? They're largely conflated right? Anyways, it seems Fillmore had something to do wit both terms awhile ago but Wiki leaves it at that. As I understand his later work, thematic elements led to frame elements, but here we're talking about nouns...

What I noticed is that some of these appear to have a similarity to a certain kind of clause I think that was discussed in the avrelang thread, e.g.

Godzilla's destruction of Tokyo

Tokyo's destruction by Godzilla

Here in the first we have two possessors and a nominal which parallel the subject, object and verb, I.e.

Godzilla destroyed Tokyo

There is also the form,

Godzilla destroying [of] Tokyo

These examples work because the noun or nominal in the middle parallels the verb. If it were to resemble the thematic relation label, or the frame element, e.g. "Author" or "work" from the arguments of "to write/make", then it would show up with a copula, I.e.

"The author of [the work]/[Sherlock Holmes] is Conan Doyle"

author(work/Sherlock Holmes)= Conan Doyle or!

"One work of [author]/[Conan Doyle] is Sherlock Holmes"

"Sherlock Holmes is the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle"

work(author/Conan Doyle)=Sherlock Holmes

Or it could be juxtaposed e.g. "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes, spoke out on..."

I guess it could be possible to get to one from from the others via verbalization, nominalization and passivazation, e.g. "Sherlock Holmes, having been wrought by Conan Doyle..."