Albert Gatt LIN 1080 Semantics Lecture 13

In this lecture We take a look at argument structure and thematic roles these are the parts of the sentence that correspond to the participants in the situation described thematic roles help to classify the kinds of relations between entities (people, things, places) in a situation

Classifying thematic roles Part 1

Some distinctions Mary hit John. Syntactic functions: Surface subject: Mary Surface object: John Thematic roles: Mary is the AGENT in the situation John is the PATIENT

Some distinctions John was hit by Mary. Syntactic functions: Surface subject: John Surface prepositional object: Mary Thematic roles: Mary is still the AGENT in the situation John is still the PATIENT Arguments with specific roles have typical syntactic functions, but roles stay constant when the surface order changes.

Thematic roles: AGENT doer or initiator of an action capable of “volitional” behaviour typically animate Silvia cooked dinner. The cat climbed the wall. Related to: ACTOR conceived as a more general role AGENT is a kind of ACTOR ACTOR does not need to display volition: The car ran over the hedgehog

Thematic roles: AGENT (cont) Some tests have been proposed for AGENT-hood Jackendoff (1972): to test if a participant is an agent, try adding some phrase that makes volition explicit John opened the letter deliberately John opened the letter in order to read it ?John received the letter in order to read it

Thematic roles: PATIENT undergoes the effect of some action often changes its state can be animate or inanimate The sun melted the ice.

Thematic roles: PATIENT Jackendoff (1990) proposes the following test: if it makes sense to ask What happened to X? then X is probably the patient. Sue slapped John. What happened to John? (He got slapped) The book was in the library. What happened to the book? (Anomalous!) What happened to the library? (Anomalous!)

Thematic roles: THEME Entity which is moved by an action or whose location or state is described need not be animate The book is in the library. Some authors treat THEME and PATIENT as the same role.

Thematic roles: EXPERIENCER Used for entities that display some awareness of an action/ sensation/state not volitional, unlike AGENT I feel sick. Jack saw the lion in the bushes.

Thematic roles: BENEFICIARY entity for whose benefit the action was performed typically realised as complement of a for-PP Jackson painted a picture for his wife

Thematic roles: INSTRUMENT the means by which an action is performed often realised as complement of a with-PP He burst the door with a sledgehammer

Thematic roles: LOCATION place where something is place where action takes place typically realised as complement of a locative PP (under, in, on) The tiger hid behind the curtain

Thematic roles: GOAL thing towards which something moves can be literal or metaphorical movement John gave the letter to Mary She told the Joke to her friends NB: some theorists refer to certain GOALs as RECIPIENTs especially in the case of give and similar verbs

Thematic roles: SOURCE the entity from which something moves or originates can be literal or metaphorical typically realised in a from-PP I got the idea from Jason. I come from Malta.

Problems with these classifications Different authors have different views about what qualifies as what e.g. to some, there is no distinction between PATIENT and THEME There are some ambiguous cases: Margarita received a gift. GOAL? RECIPIENT? BENEFICIARY?

Dealing with the ambiguity Jackendoff (1990): some roles are more primary than others different roles belong to different levels of interpretation thematic tier: describes spatial relations roles include THEME, GOAL, SOURCE, LOCATION action tier: describes ACTOR-PATIENT type relations main roles are therefore ACTOR/AGENT and PATIENT, EXPERIENCER, BENEFICIARY, INSTRUMENT Sentences receive an interpretation on both levels

Jackendoff (1990) Sue hit Fred. thematic tier: THEME (Sue) GOAL (Fred) action tier: ACTOR (Sue) PATIENT (Fred) Bill entered the room. thematic tier: THEME (Bill) GOAL (the room) action tier: ACTOR (Bill) N.B. not all arguments need to be represented at both levels!

Difficulties with thematic roles Intuitively, they are there, but they are very difficult to delimit Classifications like AGENT/PATIENT etc must allow for a lot of variation in what qualifies. e.g. the child cracked the mirror is the mirror a PATIENT? More serious problem: how to define each role. there needs to be some semantic motivation i.e. we need to show that the distinctions capture meaningful distinctions in a semantic theory

Dowty (1991) Attempt to deal with the problem of defining thematic roles correctly. Example: What does x have in common in: x murders y, x nominates y x interrogates y Dowty: they have a set of entailments in common x does a volitional act x causes an event to take place involving y x moves or changes externally NB. These entailments are carried by all the above sentences, and they all feature the role of x

Dowty (1991) Proposed to view roles as prototypes rather than define several roles, each crisply delimited, he proposed two basic prototypes: Proto-Agent, Proto-Patient each prototype has a list of characteristic entailments arguments in a sentence qualify as one or the other to different degrees

Dowty (1991) Proto-Agent 1. volitional involvement in the event or state 2. sentience / perception 3. causes an event or a change of state in another participant 4. movement relative to the position of another participant Proto-Patient 1. undergoes a change of state 2. incremental theme 3. causally affected by another participant 4. stationary relative to movement of another participant

Degrees of thematic role-hood Under Dowty’s conception, some arguments will be more Proto-Agent-like than Proto-Patient-like John cleaned the house has all the entailments of the Proto-Agent John dropped the suitcase lacks volition, but has sentience The storm destroyed the house lacks sentience and volition

Why thematic roles? Part 2

Thematic roles and argument selection There seem to be systematic ways in which roles typically map to grammatical functions e.g. EXPERIENCER is usually the subject PATIENT is usually the object Roles therefore allow us to predict how arguments are linked to the verb given its semantics. Often, a theta-grid for a verb is proposed Crack: underlined role maps to subject order of roles allows prediction of grammatical function

Dowty’s Argument Selection Principle if a verb takes a subject and an object the argument with the greatest number of Proto-Agent properties will be the one selected as subject; the one with the greatest no. of Proto-Patient properties will be selected as object.

Dowty on argument selection Corollary 1 of the ASP: if two arguments have roughly equal numbers of Proto-Agent and Proto-Patient properties, either one or both may be the direct object Corollary 2 of the ASP: with a 3-place predicate (e.g. give), the direct object will probably be the argument with the greatest number of Proto- Patient properties

The rationale Dowty’s model seems to have high predictive power. e.g. In describing a shoot event, involving, we are likely to map John to subject, the dog to object, the gun to a PP John has the highest no. of Proto-Agent roles out of the dog and the gun, dog has higher no. of Proto-Patient roles

Other thematic roles Proto-Agent and Proto-Patient are the basic prototypes in Dowty’s model the idea is to then view other roles like EXPERIENCER etc as sharing some of the properties of a Proto-Agent/Patient, but not all

Dowty’s thematic role hierarchy Dowty’s principles are meant as (violable) constraints on how arguments of a verb are linked to it syntactically. They also allow us to speak of candidacy for subjecthood by “degrees” Proposed hierarchy: elements higher up have more Proto-Agent properties, so more likely to be subjects AGENT > INSTRUMENT EXPERIENCER > PATIENT > SOURCE GOAL

Summary Thematic roles are a crucial linking feature between syntax and semantics In models like Dowty’s, some attempts are made to predict syntactic features (subject, object etc) from underlying semantics