Where there's smoke, there's hydrogen cyanide.

Question

Hello everyone,I would like to know how I could appropriately analyze the above sentence. Could it be analyzed in the following way? 3rdpps BE THERE Th: Located (hydrogen cyanide) SUB CON (where) 3rdpps BE THERE Source Any advice would be greatly appreciated. sneakergroove

Avangi · Accepted Answer

Hi,

Just out of curiosity, what do you call this type of analysis? I've never seen anything like it.

Best wishes, - A.

MrPedantic · Answer

It seems to work; though I'm not sure why the "smoke" is labelled "source". That would seem to restrict the meaning.

(I share Avangi's interest, by the way.)

MrP

Sneakergroove · Answer

Hello,

First of all, thank you both for taking the time to respond to my post. I greatly appreciate it. To answer the first question, this type of analysis stems from a socio-cognitive grammar of English that I learned in university about 10 years ago.

To answer the second question, I chose Source to accompany the Th: Located. However, I understand that this is not fully correct. Perhaps I could assign a role such as Place to smoke or even Goal:Location, but with this goal I encounter the same problem as Source because it necessitates an Agent and Th:Transferent.

By the way, I would like to know if there is a more modern way of presenting this analysis. I have looked at both Chomsky's Minimalism and Bresnan's Lexical-Functional Syntax theories, but so far I haven't been able to find much regarding argument roles and how to incorporate them into such an analysis. That is why I have chosen the older socio-cognitive grammar paradigm. Fortunately, as you MrPedantic wrote that my analysis seems to work, perhaps my analysis is not yet too outdated.

However, and this is for anyone who may be reading this post, if you know of a website or a book that may help me in this sort of analysis or if you have some advice as to how to present better this analysis, I would greatly appreciate it.

sneakergroove

Where there's smoke, there's hydrogen cyanide.

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