Elsewhere, I have proposed that when we describe an event at
least one of the force and result vectors and at least one of the patient
and the agent are part of the description (Warglien et al. (2012),
Gärdenfors 2014). When describing an event, agents and patients are
typically expressed by noun phrases and actions and results by verb
phrases.11 Given this suggestion for event expressions, the model thus
explains the linguistically basic distinction between nouns phrases and
verb phrases. In contrast to mainstream linguistics, this distinction is
made on a semantic basis derived from the cognitive representation of
events.
Verbs cannot mean just anything. Kiparsky (1997) proposed that a
verb can express inherently at most one semantic role, such as theme,
instrument, direction, manner, or path. Rappaport Hovav and Levin
(2010: 25) strengthened this by associating semantic roles with argument
and modifi er positions in an event schema, and proposed that ”a
root can only be associated with one primitive predicate in an event
schema, as either an argument or a modifi er”. By using the cognitive
notion of a domain, I can refi ne and strengthen the constraints proposed
by Kiparsky and by Rappaport Hovav and Levin: