Transcript Choose your love

Lennart Lönngren
University of Tromsø
LOVE
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Let us start with a sentence in the active
voice and its passive counterpart.
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Everybody loves her.
She is loved by everybody.
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The preposition by in the passive
sentence must be marked as syntactic: it
does not occupy a node in the semantic
representation.
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Everybody loves her.
She is loved (by) everybody.
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Is in is loved, as opposed to was in was
loved, is a tense marker, functioning as a
predicate. The carrier of the
corresponding meaning in the active
sentence is a morpheme, which we mark
as incorporated.
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Everybody love<s> her.
She is loved (by) everybody.
Alternatively, we could extract a portmanteau
morpheme from is: (is)<PRES>, but that
would be an unnecessary complication.
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This is not a complete representation. The
tense markers in both sentences function
as a two-place predicate, the first valency
position of which is occupied by the
implicit speech act verb «say».
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«s.» Everybody love<s> her.
«s.» She is loved (by) everybody.
«s.» = «(I) say»
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The implicit verb also dominates the
syntactic top node, i.e. love.
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«s.» Everybody love<s> her.
«s.» She is loved (by) everybody.
«s.» = «(I) say»
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In the following tense markers and speech
act predicates will be disregarded.
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«s.» Everybody love<s> her.
«s.» She is loved (by) everybody.
«s.» = «(I) say»
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Everybody loves her.
She (is) loved (by) everybody.
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Now let us compare an ordinary
sentence with its cleft counterpart.
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I love Mary.
It is Mary that I love.
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Three words in the cleft sentence are
syntactic. (The topicalization of Mary
can be handled by a special implicit
predicate, which we disregard here.)
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I love Mary.
(It is) Mary (that) I love.
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Paraphrases can also be created by means
of certain role-markers:
He loved his new car.
The object of his love was his new car.
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We mark four of the words in the
paraphrase as syntactic.
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He loved his new car.
(The object of) his love (was) his new car.
Note that his in his love is not a predicate,
whereas his in his car is a two-place predicate.
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The same syntactic function as object
can be fulfilled by a derivative of the
verb, meaning ’object of love’. Compare:
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He loved only Mary.
Mary was the only one he loved.
Mary was his only love.
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He loved only Mary.
Mary (was the) only (one) he loved.
Mary (was) his only (love)<love>.
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In a small shop in Tucson I found the
following text:
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Choose your love
Love your choice
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Instead of buying it and putting it on the
wall I decided to analyse it.
The first step is to extract the verbs out
of the nouns love and choice. After
that we can easily establish the subject
and object relations.
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Choose your love<love>
Love your choice<choose>
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Finally, let us conflate the two parts into one
sentence. The comma separating the clauses
represents a two-place predicate with the
meaning «then».
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Choose your love<love>,
love your choice<choose>.
, (comma/pause) = «then»
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Now we can compare this sentence with
a more basic and explicit paraphrase:
Choose the person you love,
then love the person you chose.
… or still more explicitly:
Choose the person that you love,
then love the person that you chose.
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We see that the object relation arrows
in each clause now point to two
separate words. These are connected by
means of the definite article, here with
a cataphoric function.
Choose the person that you love.
The content of the connection is
coreferentiality.
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Note also in the explicit paraphrase the
different tenses: … you love vs … you chose.
To account for this we must extract the
corresponding tense morphemes:
Choose the person you love<PRES>,
Love the person you chose<PRET>,
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In the original sentence this difference is
totally implicit, but we can still represent it:
Choose your love<love>«PRES»,
love your choice<choose>«PRET».
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The difference in tense can be traced back to a
semantic distinction between the two verbs,
namely the opposition athelic / thelic.
THE END
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Whoops, I forgot overt derivatives, i.e. words
formed from love and its equivalents by
means of suffixation.
cat <lov>er
Mary’s <lov>er
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In Russian, different nouns are used in this
case.
<ljubi>tel’ koshek
Mashin <ljubov>nik
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There are also derivatives expressing the
converse relation.
<ljubim>ec caricy
the queen’s «like» favourite
min <älsk>lingsmelodi
my favourite tune
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Empty verbs in English:
Peter (makes) love (to) Mary.
Peter älskar (med) Mary.
Mary (fell in) love (with) Peter.
Mary förälskade (sig i) Peter.
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Cf. also the paraphrases:
Peter (is) Mary’s (<lov>er).
Peter (makes) love (to) Mary.
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In Russian, the equivalent of make love
cannot realize the second position.
Oni (zanimajutsja) ljubov’ju.
They (make) love.
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The following could be a way of representing
substantivized adjectives and participles.
Moi <ljubim>ye menja zhdali.
My loved ones (were) waiting (for) me.
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Now truly:
THE END
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