Spruiell, Bill
Dept. of English Language and Literature
Central Michigan University
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English Language and Literature
Central Michigan University
Mt. Pleasant, MI
3lfyuji@cmuvm.csv.cmich.edu
Title:
Wearing Multiple Hats: A Usefully Complex Theory of Participant Roles
All languages code distinctions among different types of
participants in different types of events; whether a given
general linguistic theory calls the categories thus marked "deep
cases", as in Fillmore's (1968) work, "theta roles" or
"thematic roles" as in several types of American formalist
approaches, or "participant roles" as in Systemics and some
other functionalist approaches, it will deal with them in some
manner. The issues involved are in many ways central to
linguistic theory, as they involve questions about the ways in
which language both models and constitutes experience. Much
debate about such roles in formal approaches centers around a
pair of fundamental questions: (1) Are such roles primarily
semantic, syntactic, or a mixture of the two? (cf. for example
Jackendoff (1987)), and (2) Is there a fixed set of such roles
universal to human language, or is there infinite variation?
(cf. Dowty (1991); Beard (1990)). In functionalist approaches,
such as Systemics, the answer to the first question is
frequently "yes"; the second question occasions more debate, but
most functionalists are suspicious of categorical universals,
avoiding strong claims for fixed sets of roles. It is possible,
however, to discern functionalist equivalents of those
questions: (1') What is the relation between participant roles,
as categories, and other types of linguistic (or
extralinguistic) categories or processes?; and (2') How do we
account for the similarities and differences among the
role-inventories we use when describing disparate languages?
In this paper, I will propose an account of participant roles in which a given participant may be considered as existing in more
than one role simultaneously, and argue that this relativizes
the answers to the questions above. Some accounts (Van Valin
(1993), Beard (1990)) allow participants to be assigned multiple
roles, but those roles exist in separate functional domains;
Beard makes a division between syntactic and semantic role
categories, while Van Valin distinguishes roles from macro-roles
in a way that appears to present them as fundamentally distinct.
I will extend Van Valin's analysis and claim that roles may form
a reticulated category structure and that a given participant
may be seen as existing in multiple super- and sub-ordinate role
categories, each of which has the potential to determine aspects
of the emerging communicative event. I will further argue that
the distinction between "levels" of subordinacy represent
differences in degree rather than kind. Spruiell (1990) has
argued that such a system is useful for accounting for the
meanings of participant nominalizations, and I will further
argue that it accords with some models of child language
acquisition, that it provides a mechanism whereby role systems
of languages may develop strong similarities without being
formally identical, and that it bridges linguistic and
non-linguistic experience. In addition, it provides for both
extremely delicate ("every verb has its own specific set of
roles") and highly reductionist ("there are four fundamental role-types in Language X") descriptions within the same functional
domain.