Verbs and participants
As the core of the clause, verbs play an important role in the interaction between meaning and syntax. This is because verbs are typically accompanied by nouns which refer to the participants in the event or state the verb describes. These participants receive a range of morphosyntactic markers – case suffixes, subject or object markers, etc. – specifying which participant is the ‘actor’ or instigator of the action, which the undergoer of the action, as well as other possible roles. In English, these distinctions are made clear by grammatical relations: the noun’s coding (or, better, the noun-phrase’s coding) as subject, object or indirect object of the verb. In some other languages the job of indicating who acted on whom is done by affixes or particles, without any system of grammatical relations. We will see examples of both types of arrangement in this section.
There’s an obvious question we can ask here: what principles govern the morphosyntactic relationship between a verb and its arguments? In English, for example, how do we know which noun phrase to code as subject and which to code as object? Given a situation in which a car hit a tree, why is it that we must describe this as the car hit the tree, and not as the tree hit the car? Or again, why can we convert (1a) into (1b) and (1c), and (2a) into (2b), but not (2a) into (2c)?
These questions all concern the ways noun phrases relate morphosyntactically to verbs. More generally, we can ask what semantic distinctions are operative in case-systems like the ones illustrated in (4) from Finnish (Finno-Ugric; Finland):
The choice between different case-endings for karhu ‘bear’ has implications for the overall interpretation of the sentence. An obvious general answer to these questions is that the morphosyntactic facts somehow depend on the meaning being conveyed. In English, whether a noun is subject or object depends on what its role is in the meaning of the clause to which it belongs: if a car hits a tree, we have to say that the car hit the tree, with car as subject and tree as object, because that is, in some sense, part of the meaning of subject and object position in an active clause. The semantic basis of these choices is made very clear in the Finnish example: when the noun for ‘bear’ is in the accusative case, the clause means ‘shoot the/a bear’; when it’s in the partitive case, it means ‘shoot at the/a bear’. In this section, we will be exploring the ways in which meaning affects the clause-level relation between a verb and its participants.
