KEY TOPICS

• Grammatical relations

• Case

• The nominative-accusative pattern

• The ergative-absolutive pattern

• Valence-changing constructions, including voice

How semantic roles are syntactically marked

In the last chapter we learned about different semantic roles and how these are connected to the predicate class with which they occur. In this chapter we look at how those semantic roles are made clear in the syntax. In other words, we look at how languages show who did what to whom, and with what.

In addition, we find that macrorole arguments – that is, the actor and the undergoer – group together in different ways. In this section I begin by describing the morpho-syntactic ways that languages mark semantic roles.

Linear order

Word order

In many languages, the actor and undergoer arguments appear in a certain position in the sentence and this tells us which is the actor and which the undergoer. In English, for example, the actor argument appears before the verb and the undergoer appears after the verb in a declarative sentence. This is why English is said to have a ‘Subject-Verb-Object’ word order or, in our terminology, Actor-Predicate-Undergoer constituent order. We know from the order of the constituents in (1a), for example, that the alien is the actor, the one doing the zapping.