On Language Log, Mark Liberman has returned to the antique (and deeply inadequate) assumptions of school grammar, in a piece on Stanley Fish’s recent booklet “How to Write a Sentence: And How To Read One“:
in his tour of great sentences, there’s almost no syntactic analysis — and neither is there any careful analysis at any other level of linguistic structure. Nor is there any advice to the reader about where or how to learn more about the structure and function of these “little world[s] made cunningly” …
This is probably just as well, because what little linguistic analysis Prof. Fish gives us is full of assumptions from old-fashioned grade-school grammar, about whose inadequacies he’s curiously incurious. If he were writing about about the body, he’d be enthusing about the precarious balance of the four humours; but since he’s writing about syntax, his central assumption — obviously false and curiously unexamined – is that sentences are all about agents, actions, and (optionally) things acted upon
As a contribution to this discussion, I offer a file I’ve been assembling for some years (for introductory syntax courses) confronting one piece of the Agent-Action View of syntactic organization, in which the building blocks of syntax are identified semantically — as agents, actions, and (optionally) patients (things acted upon) — rather than (correctly) by syntactic category (like NP and V) and syntactic function (like subject, predicator, and (direct) object). This piece is the association between subjects and agents, which is much more complex than in the Agent-Action view: in the real world, agents are sometimes expressed by non-subjects (as in the by-phrases of agentive passives) and subjects very often denote non-agent participants in some situation; concomitantly, the predicators in clauses with non-agentive subjects don’t denote actions (but other sorts of situations).
There’s still some relationship between subjects and agents, but that relationship isn’t identity.
On to the inventory of the participant roles of subjects.
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