universality of gfs

[Rachel Nordlinger]

Avery wrote:

>How well does it really work to do it in terms of strictly semantic
Agent and Patient concepts?  What about the treatment of a verb like
`see', for example?  Dixon invented A and O in part because the
semantics of Agent and Patient weren't always really being obeyed, so
maybe it might be an idea to ask the investigator how A, S & O would
work out (basically as a way of smoking out more data; these terms
carry slightly different theoretical baggage than subject & object).

What I expect to see is Agent-like arguments going one way, and
Patient-like arguments going another, without any simple & solid
definition of Agent that will explain it (Acehnese is like this,
self-propelled vehicles are for example treated grammatically as
Agents).  If there's a reasonable amount of this kind of
arbitrariness, you can say that there have to be something like A and
O rather than just Agent and Patient.  And if there really isn't,
that's very interesting too.
>

Yes -- I expect that things will work in the way you describe: that
the cross-referencing doesn't line up completely with Agent and
Patient, but with Agent-like and Patient-like, but I will have to
check....

Rachel