Sætningsled, kasus og signifikation

In this presentation I try to conceive of the theme of the colloquium as a problem concerning semantic or thematic roles. I find it hard to support an idea about these roles as being semantic entities and/or explaining tools in grammar. My basis for this is a certain linguistic theory, Formative Grammar, developed by me, and implying that the linguistic functions of human beings have a specific architecture. The theory is both formal, including formalisms, and incorporated in a pragmatic framework, a theory of universal pragmatics.

It follows from this that the way in which sentences are often regarded as mirrors of roles acting in scenarios, is inadequate. Not all, if even most, of the situations we encounter can be depicted by means of role theories since fairly large parts of nature is inhabited by nonhuman entities, and sentences have to deal with these too. Another objection deals the philosophical basis that claims about role theory. My main concern is they cannot be defined in a satisfactory way as entities and that one is not able to set up criteria for the falsification of the claims mentioned.

As for sentences constituents I see them as expressions of concepts, and I see grammatical case as one way of telling the language users what syntactic status a specific constituent has. Case is a part of what I call morphological signification (another part is verbal conjugation), and this is opposed to what I call topological signification, i.e. the syntactic categories are revealed by the linear distribution of the constituents. Roles play no part in this model of syntactic functions.