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			     CSLI SEMINAR
       How Complex is the Mapping between Semantics and Syntax:
		      Agents and Themes in Dutch
			     Annie Zaenen
			(zaenen.pa@xerox.com)
		2:15, May 19, Cordura Conference Room

Recently syntacticians have turned their attention again to the
correlations between the meaning of words and their syntactic
properties. A popular view is that the semantics of a verb is the
basis for a classification of its arguments into thematic roles and
that a hierarchy of these roles determines the grammatical realization
of these arguments (as subjects, objects, etc). I will discuss some
data from Dutch that show that this picture has to be complicated in a
least two ways. First one has to assume broader equivalence classes
that mediate between the semantically defined thematic roles and the
grammatical ones. Second some of the phenomena that have been analyzed
in terms of thematic roles (or similar lexical notions which can be
though of as representations of lexical aspect (i.e., Aktionsart) need
to be analyzed as conditioned by sentence aspect.