The present paper argues that when thematic roles are restricted to judgments about causal properties of events , it falls short of accounting for cases where thematic roles reflect judgments about dispositional properties of objects . I develop my argument with a case study on a class of verbs that have been called ‘Emission Verbs’ and which are difficult to bring in line with the unaccusativity hypothesis put forward by Perlmutter. Reviewing two diametrically opposed accounts of Emission Verbs in the literature, I show that the thematic-semantic relation between the events described by Emission Verbs and their single arguments cannot be characterized unambiguously in terms of causal properties of events but pertains to dispositional properties residing in the emitter argument. The paper develops a lexical-semantic analysis of Emission Verbs according to which the event described by an Emission Verb is the manifestation of the dispositional property of the emitter argument when appropriate external circumstances obtain. The paper concludes by outlining how the proposed dispositional analysis of Emission Verbs may inform the analysis of the causative alternation.

中文翻译：

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性格及其表现的口头描述：排放动词的案例研究

本文认为，当主位角色仅限于对事件因果属性的判断时，就无法解释主位角色反映对客体倾向属性的判断的情况。我通过对一类被称为“排放动词”的动词的案例研究来发展我的论点，这些动词很难与 Perlmutter 提出的非宾格假设保持一致。回顾文献中对排放动词的两个截然相反的描述，我表明排放动词所描述的事件与其单个论点之间的主位-语义关系不能明确地根据事件的因果属性来表征，而是属于存在于事件中的倾向属性。发射器参数。本文对排放动词进行了词汇语义分析，根据该分析，排放动词所描述的事件是在适当的外部环境获得时，排放动词的倾向属性的表现。本文最后概述了所提议的排放动词的倾向分析如何为因果交替的分析提供信息。