تسجيل الدخول

تسجيل

THEMATIC (THETA) ROLE

المؤلف:  John Field

المصدر:  Psycholinguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P302

2025-10-19

690

THEMATIC (THETA) ROLE

The semantic role of a constituent in a sentence. Consider the following sentences:

Julie opened the door.

The key opened the door.

Paul fears wasps.

In each, the first Noun Phrase is the syntactic subject. But in a. Julie is an agent (she performs an action). In b. the key is an instrument In c. Paul is an experiencer (he undergoes an experience but does not do anything). Describing constituents in terms of their theta roles gets behind the surface form of a sentence to its underlying propositional content. Major theta roles include: Agent (actor)– Patient (human sufferer of action)– Theme (non-human sufferer of action)– Experiencer Instrument– Beneficiary– Recipient– Location– Goal.

Theta roles have been incorporated into theories of speech production. An utterance is constructed around a central notion or predicate, which is often (but not always) a verb. When the speaker accesses a verb in their lexicon, they gain information about the syntactic frame which the verb usually requires: for GIVE, this might be V (_ NP1, NP2) as in give Mary a present or V (_ NP2 to NP2) as in give a present to Mary. Semantic information about theta role constraints then specifies which lexical items can fill the slots in the frame. With GIVE, NP1 requires a Recipient and NP2 requires a Theme. Further semantic information can extend the restrictions on potential fillers by specifying, for example, that NP2 is usually inanimate and portable.

  See also: Argument structure, Predicate