Problems with Patients: planting roses

We had a well-known and much-discussed set of examples that bear directly on participant roles and the question of whether they relate only to the objective world of the physicist or whether they also relate to the world as conceived and perceived by ordinary speakers of human languages. The examples are in (34).

Examples (34a) and (34b) are not identical in meaning. Example (34b) is true if the gardener filled the garden with rose bushes, whereas (34a) leaves it open whether the rose bushes are all over the garden or only in one part of it. If (34b) is true, (34a) is true; if (34a) is true, (34b) might or might not be true depending on the details of a particular event of planting.

The differences in meaning accompany differences in syntax; the latter make it clear that we are dealing with two different constructions.

. There are differences in word order: (34a) planted roses garden vs (34b) planted garden roses.

. Garden is preceded by a preposition in (34a) but not (34b); roses is preceded by a preposition in (34b) but not (34a).

. The preposition in (34a) is in, but in (34b) it is with.

. Roses is the direct object of planted in (34a) – (34a) can be made passive, Roses were planted in the garden by the gardener. In (34b) the direct object is garden; witness the passive The garden was planted with roses by the gardener.

It was suggested at one time that the difference between the sentences merely had to do with whether the focus was on the roses or on the garden. Three facts make this view untenable. There is the contrast in meaning; the differences in syntax set out in (i)–(iv) above indicate clearly that different constructions are involved. The differences extend to other constructions, as shown by (35) and (36).

The (a) examples all have the same ambiguous meaning; they leave it open whether the roses fill the entire garden or are confined to one part of it. The (b) examples all have the interpretation that the garden is filled with roses. The crucial point is that the grammatical criteria show that in (34a) roses is the direct object; they are presented as being directly operated on by the gardener. In (34b), the garden is presented as being directly operated on by the gardener. In terms of role, roses in (34a) is Patient and garden in (34b) is Patient. Normally, the Patient in a clause is interpreted as being completely affected by the action; the roses are completely affected in (34a), but this tells us nothing about the garden. The garden is completely affected in (34b), and this gives us the essential difference in meaning from (34a). These basic differences in grammar and meaning affect (35a, b) and (36a, b).

Of course, this interpretation can be overridden by the insertion of adverbs such as partly – The gardener partly planted the garden with roses – or by a change in preposition. The gardener planted roses in the garden does not have the same meaning as The gardener planted roses all over the garden. The difference between in and all over is crucial. Similarly, the gardener planted the garden with roses does not have the same meaning as The gardener partly planted the garden with roses. However, in the absence of such adverbs, the basic interpretation stands.

Garden in the (a) examples is the complement of the preposition in and has to be assigned the role of Place. What role goes to roses in the (b) examples? Recall the discussion of (33), which concluded that in all the examples with has the Comitative role, based on the concept of being in the same place. Example (34b) presents the gardener as operating on the garden, causing it to be in the same place as roses. It might be objected that the English sentence *The garden is with roses is unacceptable (though its equivalent in other languages is not), but the noun phrase the garden with roses is perfectly acceptable: The garden with roses is more attractive than the garden with heathers.

Is the difference between (34a) and (34b) really all that important, and do we need to have different roles for the two constructions? After all, no matter what the word order or preposition, when you analyze real examples of the situations described by the sentences, isn’t the garden always a location and aren’t the rose bushes always the things that the gardener sets in the ground? That is, shouldn’t our analysis of the examples assign the Place role to garden and the Patient role to roses in both (34a) and (34b)?

The difficulty is that this alternative treatment ignores the grammatical evidence. The different meanings of (34a) and (34b) demonstrate that grammatical differences which some analysts might dismiss are actually important. We are not entitled to give preference to the presence of partly or to the contrast between in and all over while ignoring the contrast between in and with and a difference in grammatical function, for example garden as oblique object in (34a) and as direct object in (34b). We must also keep in mind that different constructions allow speakers to take different perspectives on what the physicist would treat as one and the same situation. Returning to (33e), we see that The builders built the wall with concrete blocks presents the concrete blocks in a Comitative role. In contrast, The builders built the wall from/out of concrete blocks presents the blocks as the Source from which the wall emerged.

We pick up the above mention of grammatical criteria and reminding ourselves that roles are not invented just on the basis of intuition. In addition to the grammatical criteria, one other criterion has been proposed, that there should be only one instance of a given role in a given clause – an exception being made for conjoined NPs, as in Celia and Sally prepared a meal. Consider, however, the example in (37).

Jim is a Goal. What role should be assigned to Margaret? Examples such as They headed for Glasgow and Let’s make for the island suggest that for signals a Goal, but we have already decided that to signals a Goal. If we allow two Goals in our analysis of (37), do we fall foul of the new principle? Fortunately, we can take advantage of the distinction between core and periphery discussed on constructions. To phrases are complements and in the core; many verbs exclude movement phrases, and that information has to be entered in their lexical entries.

With send the phrase for Margaret is optional and an adjunct, in that for phrases can occur with any combination of verb and other constituent: wrote a poem for Margaret, played CDs for Margaret, learned that dance for Margaret, sat patiently for two hours for Margaret and so on. The phrase for Margaret is in the periphery of the clause, and we can save our extra criterion by allowing a clause to have simultaneously a Goal phrase in its core and a Goal phrase in its periphery.