Sentence semantics 2: participants

Sentence semantics 2: participants

1. Thematic roles

   • Agent
   • Patient
   • Theme

2. Grammatical Relations and Thematic Roles

   • there is a tendency for subjects to be AGENTS, direct objects to be PATIENTS and THEMES, and INSTRUMENTS to occur as prepositional phrases, this need not always to be the case.

3. Verb and Thematic Role Grids

   • thematic roles is often called a thematic role grid, or theta-grid for short

4. Problems with Thematic Roles

5. General Problem

   • Dowty proposes a solution where theta-roles are not semantic primitives but are defined in terms of entailments of the predicate.

6. Middle Voice

   • The use of middle voice varies from language to language