In the sentences (4a) and (4b) in Part 1 of homework #3, you’re asked to consider the theta-roles of the participants in a scolding.

As one of you has pointed out to me in an email, there is a sense in which when, say, John scolds Mary, John is doing something, but Mary is kind of feeling something as well. It’s weird to say John scolded the rock. There does seem to be some kind of requirement that the scoldee be a conscious being.

This is an unintentional complexity here, and I think if I ever use this homework problem again, I’ll try to pick a different verb. For the purposes of winding up where the homework is intended to lead you, it would be better to put aside thoughts of the conscious effect of scolding on the target of the scolding. You want to treat the scoldee as being a more generic object, more like the object of hit or saw.

We probably do not want to admit the possibility that two participants in an event can be assigned the same theta-role (even in the situation where we are hypothesizing that the verb assigns two theta-roles, but of the same type). If we did allow for that, then there is not so much of an issue. And, perhaps we do want to have some way to allow for this, abstractly, because if John is the Agent of John ate, then Mary and John are probably both Agents in Mary made John eat. However, there Mary is the Agent of make and John is the Agent of eat, presumably. As we will see relatively soon, the connection between theta-roles and structural position is going to be hypothesized to be quite tight, in a certain abstract sense, and so it would not be compatible with supposing that the same verb can assign two theta-roles of the same type to two different arguments.

In summary, treat the scoldee in (4) more like the story in (2) or the poetry in (1).