Consider for example:
- “John slapped Jane.”
It’s possible to use emphasis in order to distinguish as follows:
- “John slapped Jane.” (That is, it wasn’t a different person who slapped Jane.)
- “John slapped Jane.” (That is, it wasn’t a different action that John took with regard to Jane.)
- “John slapped Jane.” (That is, it wasn’t a different person who got slapped by John.)
For background: Whether we’re analyzing English, Japanese, or any other language possible to evolve naturally among human beings, there’s always the distinction—again, fundamental to all natural human language—between (1) how joint attention is established on X and (2) what’s said about X.
Interestingly: When using one of the copular verbs in English (e.g., “is,” “are”), there are only two places (or slots) for the arguments: before the copular verb and after the copular verb. That is—to bring up, appositionally, the traditional terminology—there’s the copular verb along with its “subject” and its “predicate.” And those two places/slots correspond to (1) how joint attention is established on X and (2) what’s said about X.
Consider for example:
- “That man is the owner.”
- “The owner is that man.”
When not using any of the copular verbs in English, however, and instead using one of the non-copular verbs: Even when there are, like with any of the copular verbs, the two places/slots of [before] and [after] for the arguments, with no other places/slots, those two places/slots don’t correspond to (1) how joint attention is established on X and (2) what’s said about X. Case in point: If we reverse “that man is the owner” to “the owner is that man,” that’s a different semantic change that if we reverse “John slapped Jane” to “Jane slapped John.” The question becomes, then: The semantic change that we get from the swapping of [before] and [after] with copular verbs in English, how do we get that same semantic change, again in English, with non-copular verbs?
As shown at the beginning of the present essay, emphasis is one of the tools that can help: “John slapped Jane” is different than “John slapped Jane.” There’s also another tool that can help (in a perhaps more logically rigorous way): “It was John who slapped Jane” is different than “it was Jane who was slapped by John.”
For copular verbs, then: There’s only one distinction that I’m concerned with in the present essay: that between (1) the place/slot/argument that establishes joint attention on X and (2) the place/slot/argument that says something about X. But for non-copular verbs: There are two distinctions: not only that between the foregoing, but also that between, e.g., the agent and the patient for the verb “slap.”