UNIVERSITAS KRISTEN INDONESIA

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SASTRA INGGRIS
English Syntax (Srisna Lahay, SS., M.Hum.)

Name : Rivaldi Yudistira Bratanegara

NIM : 2221157001
Date : 9th April 2023
Semantic Roles

Semantic role lists constitute one of the most common and simplest forms of lexical semantic
representation adopted. They are also referred to as "case frames" (Fillmore 1968). Thus, Semantic roles
refer to the relationships between the participants in a sentence and the event or action being described.
They are a way of understanding the meaning of a sentence beyond just its grammatical structure. In other
words, semantic roles describe the functions that words or phrases have in a sentence, and how they
contribute to the overall meaning of the sentence. Some common semantic roles include agent, patient,
theme, experiencer, and instrument. The agent is the entity that performs the action described in the
sentence, while the patient is the entity that is affected by the action. The theme is the entity that is being
described or discussed in the sentence, while the experiencer is the entity that has a sensory or emotional
experience. The instrument is the means by which the action is carried out. Understanding semantic roles
is important for various tasks in natural language processing, including semantic analysis, machine
translation, and question answering. By identifying the semantic roles of different words or phrases in a
sentence, we can better understand the meaning of the sentence and the relationships between its different
components.

Semantic roles (also known as thematic roles or theta roles) attempt to capture similarities and differences
in verb meaning that are reflected in argument expression, with emergent generalizations that will
contribute to the mapping from semantics to syntax. They belong, then, to the semantics/syntax interface.
Some of the characteristics that theories of thematic roles strive for, in order to fulfill their function are
the following, according to Dowty:

i. Completeness: Every argument of every verb is assigned some thematic role or other.
ii. Uniqueness: Every argument of every verb is assigned only one thematic role.
iii. Distinctness: Every argument of every verb is distinguished from the other arguments by the role it is
assigned. Two levels can be distinguished: strong distinctness,

if Uniqueness also holds, and weak distinctness, if it does not. In this last case, each argument is assigned
a different set of roles from other arguments of the same verb.
iv. Independence: Each role is given a consistent semantic definition that applies to all verbs and all
situations. Thus, role definitions do not depend on the meaning of the particular verb or on the other
thematic roles it assigns.

For instance, (ii) and (iii) are the ones that give GB’s theta-criterion its identity. However, it is doubtful
whether they can be maintained. Uniqueness does not seem to hold with animate subjects of verbs of
motion in sentences such as the following:

(5.13) John ran into the house

Gruber (1965) and Jackendoff (1972) claimed that John is both agent, since it initiates and sustains the
movement, and theme, since it is the object that moves.  It is also very difficult to maintain Distinctness if
examples like the ones below are considered:

(5.14) John met with Mary.

(5.15) John resembles his mother.

(5.16) A is similar to B.

Both participants seem to be playing the same role in these sentences.

The goal of semantic role theories is to obtain a set of semantic roles that can apply to any argument of
any verb. Their function is to make possible the unique identification of the arguments of the verb so that
the mapping to syntax can be carried out. Dowty calls this the argument-indexing function of thematic
roles. There have been a large number of proposals with regard to the number and nature of the list of
semantic roles needed. Below are two lists from recent Syntax textbooks:

(5.17) Thematic Roles

Agent : The ‘doer’ or instigator of the action denoted by the predicate.

Patient : The ‘undergoer’ of the action or event denoted by the predicate.
Them : The entity that is moved by the action or event denoted by the predicate.
Experiencer : The living entity that experiences the action or event denoted by the predicate.
Goal : The location or entity in the direction of which something moves.
Benefactive : The entity that benefits from the action or event denoted by the predicate.
Source : The location or entity from which something moves
Instrument : The medium by which the action or event denoted by the predicate is carried out.
Locative : The specification of the place where the action or event denoted by the predicate in
situated. (Aarts 1997: 88)

(5.18) Theme (or Patient): Entity undergoing the effect of some action.
    (Mary fell over)
Agent/Causer: Instigator of some action.
    (John killed Harry)
Experiencer: Entity experiencing some psychological state.
    (John felt happy)
Recipient/Possessor: Entity receiving/ possessing some entity.
    (John got Mary a present)
Goal: Entity towards which something moves.
    (John went home) (Radford 1997: 326)

It should be noticed that there is no agreement about which and how many roles are needed. This is
precisely one of the major drawbacks of the semantic role list approach. Although Croft (1991: 156) has
pointed out that most theories of thematic roles assume that there is only a small finite number of them,
no consensus has been reached on the number or nature of the roles. Proposals range from just a few to
hundreds of them. As two extreme cases, consider Anderson’s (1971) localist approach with just three
semantic roles (Source, Location and Goal) from which all non-local values would derive, contrasted with
the view in HPSG where each verb would assign its own peculiar semantic roles, different from the
semantic roles of any other verb (cf. Pollard and Sag 1994). So, the verb love, for example, would assign
two semantic roles: ‘lover’ and ‘lovee’. In this case, there would be no thematic role types but individual
thematic roles, using Dowty’s (1989) terms. But with them, the semantic generalizations that make the
notion interesting are lost.

References:

Fillmore, C. (1968). Lexical Entries for Verbs. Foundations of Language

Sells, P., & Kim, J. (2007). English Syntax: An Introduction. United States: CSLI Publications.

Pollard, C., & Sag, I. A. (1994). Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press.

Dowty, D. (1989). On the semantic content of the notion of “thematic role”. In G. Chiercha, B. H. Partee,
& R. Turner (Eds.), Properties, types and meaning (pp. 69-129)

Aarts, B. (1997). English Syntax and Argumentation. Macmillan Press Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-
349-25589-4