We can take this thinking beyond grammar, to the cognitive grounding of object recognition. [Note that object in this context refers to an ontological object, Sowa's Independent Physical Continuant; not as in the earlier use of the word to mean the grammatical function of Direct Object] Of course children already have visual object recognition, but that may be primarily in the procedural circuit (the child's own manipulations), not yet define the the discrete schemes of semantic memory since they are still acquiring their first language. To some extent there is likely a discrete conceptual scheme of perceived objects (seen and touched, or for food tasted and smelled), but this is just starting to be mapped to a verbal scheme with phonological forms triggering lexical constructions. In a sense, the lexical constructions must be in the head, but the relationship of semantic types with the phonological form is almost completely conventional (but see my previous remarks on the motivated relationship between sign language morphology and semantics).
We may be realist about the semantic types (they are "out there" in the extra-mental world), but even if we aren't (they might be Saussure's signifieds) the conventional relationship is surely out there in the social world of conventions.
During early stages of concept then word acquisition, what is the underlying (to some extent innate) scheme infrastructure or type system and what are the culturally shaped concept or word schemas? Scheme refers to a more or less extensive scheme of individuation with situations, situation-types, object-types, relations and parametrized states of affairs (infons). A schema refers to a specific complex type that is instantiated during a particular occurrent cognitive process or utterance. Characterizing this needs to consider what happens with otherwise cognitively-normal children who can acquire concept schemas, but have disability barriers to proceeding to word schemas, i.e. language-isolated deaf children. An account adequate for normal (evolutionarily speaking) and variant humans also needs to make sense with other hominids in evolutionary time and their conceptual schemas or counterpart. Certainly all hominids have sophisticated visual object recognition, and to some extent classify visual object types (according to use value?). What is the difference with a human scheme for discrete semantic memory, verbal or non-verbal?
If children begin their grammar acquisition as observed, then "object markers is accusative languages and subject markers in ergative languages are first applied to the arguments of verbs involving direct physical action, e.g. give, grab, take, hit, and not to those of verbs such as say, see, call out."
I might point out that in basal Austronesian languages, many manipulative verbs have a preferred accusative-type transitivity, while certain other experience verbs have a preferred ergative-type transitivity (either patient or locative/dative). [Need to test this intuition with examples.]
Goldberg's objective is to characterize the most senses of common phrasal constructions, and to understand the relationship with other less central senses. Her example is the ditransitive construction in English:
- Central sense: Agent successfully causes recipient to receive patient
- verbs that inherently signify acts of giving: give pass hand serve feed ...
- verbs of instantaneous cause of ballistic motion: throw toss slap kick poke fling shoot ...
- verbs of __: bring take ...
- Conditions of Satisfaction imply that agent causes recipient to receive patient
- verbs of __: guarantee promise owe ...
- Agent causes patient not to receive patient
- verbs of __: refuse, deny ...
- A acts to cause R to receive P at some future point in time
- verbs of __: leave bequeath allocate reserve grant ...
- A enables R to receive P
- verbs of __: permit allow ...
- A intends to cause R to receive P
- verbs of __: bake make build cook sew knit ...
- verbs of __: get grab win earn ...
Although this work is about grammatical objects in a transitive construction, I also want to relate it to the metaphysical-cognitive basis of objects in general. It is possible to consider situation-types and particularly events or scenes as prior to the individuation of object-types.
Hominids scanning their visual field bring attentional focus to "what is happening". They may referential actions (like pointing, or naming, or mentioning the noun of an object type, or structure noun phrases) to achieve a shared information state with an interlocutor hominid. The salience of this reference often depends of change of position or location (during manipulation, for example) or change of state. Individuating a perceived thing as a continuant object is premised on scenes where something or nothing of interest is happening. And proceeding beyond NP's to clauses, happening scenes or events get clasified by the verbal relations, where the subscene before the individuated action is a situation-type that stands in the mentioned relation to the same subscene after the action. Picking out such a dimension of an event happening is precisely what it means to mention an action with a verb.
So a verb-defined action-relation that is not just a simple relation (like those of propositions and some modifiers) but a constraint between a before-subscene and an after-subscene. The constraint is a meaning bearing relation, that among other things allows the speaker-hearer to pick out a change in the configuration of participants in the action scene. The participants as objects (or persons or creatures or stuff) are involved in the scene in a particular participant role. At the meta-level these participant roles can be considered at a fine granularity (appropriate to a specific verb), a medium granularity (in a semantic frame, possibly a role unique to only a few frames), or a the coarse granularity of thematic roles that are visible in syntax, and this may itself divide into positions in obliqueness-ordered argument structure and grammatical functions as subject and/or complements. In some Austronesian languages like Tagalog/Filipino, the ang is both determiner and marker and the ang-marked NP is both a subject and simultaneously a complement with surface case marking.
Not all verbs are action verbs, there are also stative verbs. "Words like remain, bother, appear, and exist are verbs, but do not involve any action." [Kim and Sells 2008] In agglutinative Austronesian, there are many roots which are flexibly verb or noun depending on the affixation, and yet take arguments (scene participants) in either discourse context.
So action verb relations are information-bearing constraints. The prototypical scenes that they describe or manifest speech acts involve constraints like cooccurrence, causation, volitional intention, and non-volitional intentionality (like passive perception). A set of named constraints including these might provide a controlled vocabulary or ontology for describing the meaning contributions of specific senses of a phrasal or lexical construction. What is FrameNet doing in this area?
[Kim and Sells 2008] Jong-Bok Kim and Peter Sells. English Syntax: An Introduction. CSLI, 2008.
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