Morphosyntactic Alternations in English - Functional and Cognitive Perspectives - Pilar Guerrero Medina
4. Alternation and Participant Role: A contribution from a Systemic Functional Grammar
Morphosyntactic Alternations in English - Functional and Cognitive Perspectives - Pilar Guerrero Medina
Amy Neale [+]
Queen Mary, University of London
Description
Amy Neale’s contribution is located within the approach to TRANSITIVITY developed within the Cardiff Grammar (CG) version of systemic theory. Building on the Systemic Functional notions of “Process”, “system network” and “delicacy” and extending the semantic classification of verb senses, she provides an alternative approach to Levin’s (1993) for modelling paradigmatic relations between verb senses. After outlining how verbal alternations such as the “dative alternation” can be handled by the CG through the lexicogrammar, the article deals in more detail with alternating constructions which involve different Participant Role configurations, positing that they demonstrate a change in the verb sense conveyed and should be thus treated as examples of “near equivalences”.