Aktanterne har udspillet deres rolle

Resumé

This paper discusses some fundamental issues regarding syntactic analysis and semantic roles. Traditionally, a syntactic analysis has as its point of departure a morphological analysis claiming a one-to-one correspondence between a morphological form and a syntactic function. In the paper, I argue that this procedure must be reversed. A morphological analysis is only useful if one wants to describe morphological languages such as Finnish and German, whereas topological languages such as Danish and English only reveal a rudimentary morphological system. In my opinion case as well as topology is a particular device for syntactic signification in a specific language, whereas syntax is universal; at least if the syntactic description is based on a formal, universal theory. A very short introduction to such a universal theory on syntax is given in the paper, namely the so called Epi-Formal Analysis of Syntax (EFA(X)). By claiming the existence of semantic roles in sentences one implicitly claims that a sentence describes a scenario and the semantic roles are that the actors on the scene. The problem is that these semantic roles are sentence internal entities based on definitions that are internal to the theory resulting in entirely internal explanations on the semantics of the sentence. An agent is an agent because the role acts as an agent in the scenario described by the sentence. According to EFA(X), that is a normal theory based on external definitions of the theoretical concepts, a language user’s mental representations of the entities of the world and the relations between these entities as mental concepts in an utterance. The concepts are composed of the language user’s mental images of the entities combined with mental images of the sounds referring to these entities. An utterance is a structure of concepts, which is expressed by sentences and constituents, so a sentence is an expression of the language user’s mental images of (a small part of) the world. In this way, the theoretical concepts of EFA(X) are defined externally providing external explanations of the semantics of the sentence. If one agrees in the general assumption that the world consists of entities in relations and that sentences are expressions of the language user’s mental images of the entities of the world, there is no need for sentence internal concepts like semantic roles to explain the semantics of the sentence.