And on me:
>> ## There's another way to look at er and ee which doesn't require them to
>> have any common defining semantic features ('content') at all. Suppose we
>> have a super-category, Sao (State of affairs, as in HPSG).
>
>[psoa (propositional s. o. a.)]
## Woops. Where did sao come from? Oh well ....


>> That interpretation means that there's no reason why ees should have
>> anything in common across all Saos (though they should have common
>features
>> across some subset of Saos). It also allows the choice of er and ee to be
>> to some extent arbitrary when the typical single-argument characteristics
>> are split between the arguments, as with verbs like LIKE, PLEASE and
>> RECEIVE.
>
>This on its own is not linguistically relevant; it needs to be tied to
>an account of linking, say. 
## I don't see how it can fail to be linguistically relevant; but it's
really a question of how we organise such things cognitively. If we do have
a hierarchical classifcation of PSOAs and if inheritance applies, then
different characteristics will automatically be inherited by the er (the
only argument of a single-argument PSOA) according to which PSOA type it's
inherited from. 

It's not even obvious that this model would
>adequately predict 1st arg linking to subj and 2nd arg to obj, for
>transitives.
## Of  course not - that's why I say below that you need different linking
rules for different kinds of languages; e.g. 2nd arg linking to subject in
an ergative language.

>
>And it is unclear why you identify the argument of single argument
>soas with one of the arguments of multiple argument soas.
## Because it will happen automatically by inheritance if single-argument
SOAS are the default: they will have just a single argument, which we're
calling er. So if Action (i.e. Do-ing) has just an er, and Kicking isa
Doing, then Kicking will have an er too.

>
>> This is where I think Dowty comes in.
>
>I don't see what you're getting at. Dowty tells you how to map from
>a group of arguments to Subject and Object. As far as I can see, for
>D's scheme (of which I am a fan) to work all that matters is the arguments'
>content. To the extent that er/ee lack content, they would be linguistically
>irrelevant.
## Fair point - Dowty's system is much too rigid, in my opinion, because it
doesn't generalise easily to PSOAs that aren't actions. 

>
>I'm probably failing to grasp your point, but if er/ee don't have constant
>content then they must be identified by a separate stipulation for each
>soa. The grounds for identifying er vs ee, if they have no constant content,
>is which links to subj and which to obj, and hence your two Linking Rules
>are tautologously vacuous.
## Yes, I think you're missing the significance of the isa hierarchy. It
has SOA at the top, and maybe SOA has an er, but the er has virtually no
content - i.e. nothing is inherited from that level. But under SOA you have
States, Actions and so on, each of which adds more to the definition of er;
and below them you have further subtypes (e.g. Going, Feeling, whatever),
and so on till you get to the most specific SOAs. Each level in the isa
hierarchy adds a different set of characteristics to what is inherited from
higher up and of course, depending on which branch of the tree you go down,
you inherit a very different set of characteristics.


Richard (= Dick) Hudson

Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, 
Gower Street, London WC1E  6BT.
+44(0)171 419 3152; fax +44(0)171 383 4108;
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm


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