At least some of you have noticed (and talked to me about) the fact that it isn’t always all that straightforward to figure out whether a verb is transitive or intransitive—and by extension how many θ-roles it has.

There does appear to be a little bit of “squishiness” in this, so let me say how I would approach it, and comment about of a couple of verbs in particular.

What makes this somewhat tricky is that English is kind of flexible and forgiving in what it lets you do with verbs. Sometimes you can turn transitive verbs into intransitive verbs, sometimes it seems that you can leave “required” arguments unpronounced (which of course raises the question of what it means to be “required”).

For example, punch. This is pretty clearly a verb that really likes to be transitive, with an Agent (the puncher) and a Theme (the punchee).

Yet, consider: Little Jimmy is a really badly behaved kid. He punches.

This is kind of saying something else. It really removes the sense of the punch-recipients from the sentence. What we’re talking about is Jimmy engaging in a punching activity, not talking about a particular punching event. (In fact, maybe Jimmy just stands in a room by himself and makes punching gestures into the air.) Given this difference in meaning, I would say that in Jimmy punched Bobby, punch has both an Agent and a Theme, and had the two [uN] features that brings this about. But in Jimmy punches, there is just an Agent—Jimmy punches is kind of like Jimmy swam.

The conclusion I draw from this is that what determines what’s required is deeply intertwined with the meaning of the verb. It’s the meaning that is either transitive or intransitive. So, at the very least, this means that in order to really decide what θ-roles a verb has, you need to consider it in the context of the actual sentence you are analyzing.

As if that weren’t bad enough, there are other cases that I think are best analyzed as cases where there is, e.g., a required Theme, but one that can nevertheless be left unpronounced. So, it’s “required” by the meaning, and it is there in the syntactic tree, but it isn’t in the sentence you say. An example of this might be give in this case: I gave to the charity.

This doesn’t really mean ‘I engaged in a giving activity with the charity as a Goal’, it means I gave money to the charity. It’s not a good way to describe an event of giving cookies to the charity, or giving used pencils to the charity. There’s just something canonical enough about this situation that you’re allowed to leave “money” unsaid.

One possible test of this is to see if you can refer back to the allegedly unpronounced argument with a pronoun: I gave to the charity, but it was only half as much as the heating bill. The it here refers to the money, successfully. Compare this to one of the cases where there allegedly isn’t a Theme at all, like: Jimmy punches. It sounds quite wrong to say: Jimmy punches, and they cry. The pronoun they can’t refer back to the people that Jimmy might have been punching. The difference between the two could be attributed to there being a real, but unpronounced argument, of give in I gave to the church, but no unpronounced argument in Jimmy punches.

Subtle and interesting. I will strive to use only clear examples where possible, but it is worth being aware of some of the complexities involved in determining what θ-roles (and thus what uninterpretable features) you assume for verbs.