The conceptual building blocks of intransitives Workshop on the building blocks and mortar of word meaning

• In this paper, I would like to make some steps toward a conceptual analysis of intransitives (comprising both intransitive verbs and intransitive verbal constructions) which does not start from the popular assumption that intransitives are ‘amputed’transitives. • More specifically, the goal of the paper is to engineer a conceptualization of thematic roles in intransitives without the bias towards a transitive derivation and conceptualization of intran-sitives a ̀ la Perlmutter (1978) 1 Transitive Thematic Roles “There is perhaps no concept in modern syntactic and semantic theory which is so often involved in so wide a range of contexts, but on which there is so little agreement as to its nature and definition, as THEMATIC ROLE and its derivative in Government-Binding theory, THETA-ROLE ” (Dowty, 1991, p. 547). • Argument-Indexing View: – Each DP argument is uniquely assigned a θ-role from a given (hierarchically ordered) inventory of roles (agent, patient, theme,...) Fillmore (1968); Chomsky (1981). – (But: how many θ-roles are there and what is their hierarchy (cp. Croft (1998))?) • Individual Thematic Role View: – Thematic relations are named/introduced by the predicates with which they occur (builder, buildee/hitter, hittee,...) (cp. e.g. Jackendoff (1983)), thematic relations are particular configurations of primitive operations (GO, STAY, CAUSE) in conceptual structures. – (But: how does conceptual structure link to formal semantics and syntax, see e.g. Pros