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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
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References: <3gtu3i$rf3@mp.cs.niu.edu> <jqbD3r3Cp.CrC@netcom.com> <D3rGKG.16u@spss.com> <3hf0fa$7p@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 1995 22:01:56 GMT
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In article <3hf0fa$7p@agate.berkeley.edu>,
 <jerrybro@uclink2.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) wrote:
>> John has the same syntactic role in
>>    John flogged Mary.
>>    John was flogged by Mary.
>> (subject position; topic; case), but has a rather different semantic role,
>> as I'm sure you'd agree if you were John.
>
>Consider:
>John ate.  John drank.  John shat.  John flogged.  John was flogged.
>
>Surely the semantic roles of "John" in the above list of statements
>have something important in common.  This remains even when objects
>are introduced.  It allows the list to be unambiguously about John.

Right; this is what I called "topic" in the citation above.

>> John has the same semantic role in 
>>    John flogged Mary.
>>    Mary was flogged by John.
>>    John's flogging of Mary (was abominable). 
>
>As I tried to show above, this takes a narrow view of semantics.

No, it just uses "semantics" as most linguists do.  Topic (what you're
talking about) and comment (what you're saying about it) is a matter of 
pragmatics.  

>In fact, if rhetorically you want to direct attention away from
>something, you can do this by keeping it from being the subject
>of your sentences.  If you want to direct attention to it, make
>it the subject.

A linguist would say that the *syntactic* role of the subject normally
coincides in English with the *pragmatic* role of the topic.  Such a
distinction is useful because the subject *isn't* always the topic of
the sentence; topic can be indicated by stress, for instance, or by
position in the sentence irrespective of subject (nominative) status,
or by explicit constructions ("What was happening to Mary was, John
flogged her"), or (in some languages, such as Quechua or Japanese), by
explicit morphemes.  

>> For that matter, although we can't say "Who did you see and John?", we
>> *can* say "You saw John and *who*?"  Yet the semantics have not changed;
>
>What semantics?  Surely, since the first example fails to ask
>anything, it can't easily be said to have semantics, and certainly
>it doesn't have the same semantics as the second example, which
>actually does ask something.

The cited paragraph was part of a response to the suggestion that something
about the semantics of "You saw John and X", where X is an unknown person
whose name we wanted, prevents our asking by saying "Who did you see John
and?"  So far as I can see, this claim is refuted by the fact that we
*can* ask "You saw John and *who*?"  

As you say, "the first example fails to ask anything".  The question is,
why does it fail to do so?  Just asserting

>The first one makes no sense, which is a fact about its semantics.

is not an explanation; it's a restatement of the problem: people don't
say that, and have trouble understanding it.  But *why* do people
have trouble making sense of it?
