As always, please submit this assignment as an email attachment with a file name including your name and the assignment number, as in "smith-550-05.doc" or .pdf.
1.Please do exercises 8.5 and 8.6 and problems 8.2 and 8.3 at the end of chapter 8.
2. Please do exercises 10.4 and 10.5 at the end of chapter 10.
3. Please reread the discussion of thematic roles at the end of chapter 3 and the discussion below. Then answer the questions that follow. The problem depends on the grammar tool have-get.
The semantic relations between verbs and their arguments can be grouped into classes called "thematic roles." These roles distribute across the different syntactic positions in clauses in complex ways. Among the most important of these roles are: agent, experiencer, goal, instrument, patient, recipient and source. Different verbs associate these roles with different positions. The following examples illustrate this variation. In each set of examples the relevant noun phrase is in italics.
Agents are normally subjects, as in sentences like:
Experiencers can be subjects, as in (4), or direct objects, as in (5) or objects of prepositions, as in (6). In languages with richer case marking than English the prepositional phrase option may correspond to an oblique case.
Goals are usually in oblique positions but they can also be direct objects.
Patients are entities affected by an action. They are usually direct objects.
Recipients most frequently oblique but they can be subjects.
Sources can similarly be oblique or subjects.
In addition to these semantically motivated thematic roles, researchers in lexical semantics often postulate a default role called the "theme," which is assigned to the least oblique non-agent noun phrase in a clause. This role can be associated with a noun phrase that also bears one of the other roles we have mentioned.
Note that thematic roles are assigned to syntactic positions, not to the entities referred to by the noun phrases that appear in these positions. Thus, it is not paradoxical that he is assigned the agent role in and himself is assigned the patient role in a sentence like (17), even though the two noun phrases refer to the same person:
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Here's the assignment question:
The following sentences with have and get are all grammatical in English.