[SESSION 6]

Unit 5:
Sentence Semantics 2:
participants.

Semántica Inglesa.
Grado de Estudios Ingleses. Tercer curso.

Manuel Casas Guijarro. 2019/2020. UNED. Centro Asociado de Sevilla.

0. Where are we?
Semantics, John I. Saeed. Chapter 6.
Sections and units Book chapters
SECTION I: Introducing semantics. Basic notions
1. Semantics in linguistics. Meaning, concepts and reality. 1, 2
SECTION II: Semantic description
2. Word meaning. 3
3. Sentence meaning: sentence relations and truth. 4
4. Sentence semantics 1: situation types. 5
5. Sentence semantics 2: participants. 6
6. Context and inference: deixis, context, information structure. 7
7. Functions of language: speech acts. 8
SECTION III: Theoretical approaches to semantic analysis
8. Meaning components and lexical relations 9
9. Formal semantics 10
Manuel Casas Guijarro. Curso 2019/2020. UNED Sevilla.
10 Cognitive semantics 11 2
0. Where are we?
Semantics, John I. Saeed. Chapter 6.

Last sessions we saw:

Chapter 1: Semantics in Linguistics.
Chapter 2: Meaning, thought and reality.
Chapter 3: Word meaning.
Chapter 4: Sentence meaning. Sentence relations and truth.
Chapter 5: Sentence semantics 1: situation types.

This session:
Chapter 6: Sentence semantics 2: participants.
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6.1 Introduction.
This section explains how a linguistic model can describe participants of a situation and
examines the role of these participants in contributing to the meaning of a sentence.
This chapter focuses particularly on the relationship between a verb and its noun
participants.
In any sentence, each entity that participates has a certain role in the action:

Ex.: Gina raised the car with a jack

Gina: entity responsible for initiating the action
the car: entity that changes its position by the action.
a jack: means by with Gina causes the action
The roles for these entities are known as semantic roles, theta roles (Ɵ-roles) or
thematic roles.
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6.2 Thematic Roles
6.2.1 Thematic roles list and definition.
We can find a list of common thematic roles in linguistic studies, such as those
by Jackendoff (1972, 1990), Andrews (1985) and Radford (1988). From this
extensive literature Saeed extracts the following list:

• Agent • Patient
• Theme • Experiencer
• Beneficiary • Instrument
• Location • Goal
• Source • Stimulus

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6.2 Thematic Roles
6.2.1 Thematic roles list and definition.
AGENT:
The initiator of some action, capable of acting with volition.
Agent is an individual who willfully initiates and carries out an action, typically
a physical action affecting other entities.
It is (typically) an animate ‘doer’ of the action
Exs.: David cooked the meat / The fox jumped out of the ditch
Some semanticists suggested that AGENT was a particular type of a more
general thematic role ACTOR. So every AGENT is an ACTOR, but not the other
way round.
Ex.: The car ran over the hedgehog ----- ‘the car’ is actor but not agent
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6.2 Thematic Roles
6.2.1 Thematic roles list and definition.
FORCE:
Inanimate entity that causes something
Ex.: The wind flattened the crops

PATIENT:
The entity undergoing the effect of some action, and often a change in state.
It is typically inanimate and non-volitional.
A PATIENT usually changes in state as a result of being affected by outside
forces.
Exs.: Enda cut back these bushes / The sun melted the ice
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6.2 Thematic Roles
6.2.1 Thematic roles list and definition.
THEME:
The entity which is moved by an action, or whose location is described.
PATIENT and THEME were originally included under OBJECTIVE.

Exs.:
Roberto passed the ball wide
The book is in the library

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6.2 Thematic Roles
6.2.1 Thematic roles list and definition.
PATIENT vs THEME
Saeed adopts the distinction that:
Patient: entity acted upon and changed by the verb’s action
Theme: entity moved in literal or figurative space by the action of the verb,
but constitutionally unchanged.

Exs.:
– Fred shattered the rock. (Patient)
– Fred threw the rock. (Theme)

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6.2 Thematic Roles
6.2.1 Thematic roles list and definition.
EXPERIENCER:
The entity which is aware of the action or the or state described by the
predicate but which is not in control of the action or state.
It involves an intellectual, perceptual, or emotive experience.

Exs.:
Kevin felt ill
Mary saw the smoke
Lorcan hear the noise

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6.2 Thematic Roles
6.2.1 Thematic roles list and definition.
BENEFICIARY:
The entity for whose benefit the action was performed.

Exs.:
Robert filled in the form for his grandmother.
They baked me a cake.

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6.2 Thematic Roles
6.2.1 Thematic roles list and definition.
INSTRUMENT:
The means by which an action is performed or something comes about.
It is something used by an agent to affect another entity.
It is typically an inanimate object manipulated by an agent.

Ex.: They signed the treaty with the same pen

LOCATION:
Te place in which something is situated or where it takes place.

Ex.: The monster was hiding under the bed.

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6.2 Thematic Roles
6.2.1 Thematic roles list and definition.
GOAL:
The entity towards which something moves, either literally, such as
‘policeman’, or metaphorically, such as ‘his friends’ in

Sheila handed her license to the policeman.

Pat told the joke to his friends.

Some authors mention that RECIPIENT is a type of GOAL, involved in actions

describing changes of possession
Ex.: He sold me this book / He left his fortune to the church
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6.2 Thematic Roles
6.2.1 Thematic roles list and definition.
SOURCE:
The entity from which something moves, either literally, such ‘Spain’, or
metaphorically, such as ‘a French magazine’ in

The plane came back from Spain.

We got the idea from a French magazine.

STIMULUS:
The entity causing an effect (usually psychological) in the experiencer.
Ex.: John didn’t like the wind / The noise frightened the passengers
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6.2 Thematic Roles
6.2.2 Tests for Thematic roles: Agent
Jackendoff (1972)

Test 1: volition phrases

If phrases like “deliberately”, “on purpose”, “in order to”, etc can be added to
the sentence.
This reflects the fact that an AGENT characteristically displays volition.

Ex.: John took the book from Bill

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6.2 Thematic Roles
6.2.2 Tests for Thematic roles: Agent
Test 2: “What did”… sentence

For an ACTOR (x) it will make sense to ask “What did x do?”
For a PATIENT (y) it will make sense to occur in the frame in “What happened
to y was...”

Ex.: Robert broke the window

- What did Robert do?

- What happened to the window was that Robert broke it.
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6.2 Thematic Roles
6.2.3 Difficulty of Thematic role assignment
I. Some difficulties

Sometimes it is difficult to know which role to assign to a particular noun phrase.

Ex.: Margarita received a gift of flowers

“Margarita” is GOAL/RECIPIENT or BENEFICIARY

Examples like this raise the following question:

Can a single entity fulfill two or more thematic roles at the same time?

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6.2 Thematic Roles
6.2.3 Difficulty of Thematic role assignment
II. Chomsky’s answer
Chomsky's “Principles and Parameters theory”: a central claim is the theta-
criterion, which states that “there must be a one-to-one correspondence
between noun phrases and thematic roles”.

III. Jackendoff’s answer

Jackendoff (1972) suggests that one nominal can fulfill more than one role. He
elaborates a theory of tiers (‘niveles’) of thematic roles:
- Thematic tier: describes spatial relations
- Action tier: describes ACTOR-PATIENT relations
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6.2 Thematic Roles
6.2.3 Difficulty of Thematic role assignment
Ex.:
Sue hit Fred
THEME GOAL (thematic tier)
ACTOR PATIENT (action tier)

These tiers would divide thematic roles into two types, perhaps as follows:
- Action tier roles: ACTOR, AGENT, EXPERIENCER, PATIENT, BENEFICIARY,
INSTRUMENT.
- Thematic tier roles: THEME, GOAL, SOURCE, LOCATION

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6.3 Grammatical relations and Thematic Roles.
- Having identified these thematic roles, the next question is
How are such roles identified in the grammar?

There are typical matchings such as:

AGENT-subject
THEME- direct object

This is not always the case, as sometimes we may find the INSTRUMENT as
subject.
Ex.: The jack raised the car.

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6.3 Grammatical relations and Thematic Roles.
Another question is that the choice of a verb involves the verbs’ requirements
for thematic roles and its grammatical relations.

• There are two basic situations where there is no match between

grammatical relations and thematic roles:

1. Where roles are omitted, and grammatical relations shift to react to this;
2. Where the speaker chooses to alter the usual matching between roles and
grammatical relations, a choice often marked by an accompanying change of
verbal voice.

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 6.3 Grammatical relations and Thematic Roles.
Examples:
• Ursula broke the ice with a pickaxe. (AGENT Ursula – subject Ursula)
• The pickaxe broke the ice. (AGENT omitted – subject The pickaxe [INSTRUMENT])
• The ice broke. (AGENT omitted – subject The ice [PATIENT])

It seems that there is usually an order of preference for speakers in order to place
the AGENT. This is known as “universal subject hierarchy”:
AGENT> RECEPIENT/BENEFACTIVE >THEME/PATIENT>INSTRUMENT> LOCATION
More expected ---------------------------------------------------------------------less expected

In English is quite rare to use LOCATION as subject

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6.4 Verbs and Thematic Role Grids.
6.4.1 What is a thematic role grid?
As we have seen before, verbs have particular requirements for their thematic
roles.
Thus, not only do we need how many arguments a verb requires (transitive,
intransitive…) but also what thematic roles hold these arguments.

This knowledge is part of the speaker’s semantic knowledge, stored for verbs.

In generative grammar, this knowledge of thematic roles is often called

“Thematic role grid”.

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6.4 Verbs and Thematic Role Grids.
6.4.1 What is a thematic role grid?

Example “Thematic role grid”:

Ex.: Put (v): <agent, theme, location>

(underlined) This role typically occurs as the subject

This entry tells us that put is a three-argument, or ditransitive, verb and shows
the thematic roles the three arguments may carry.

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6.4 Verbs and Thematic Role Grids.
6.4.2 Are all nominals in a sentence important for Thematic roles?
Arguments and adjuncts
Important: Not all nominals in a sentence are arguments. Arguments cannot
be omitted.

- Another way of making this distinction is to distinguish between:

- participant roles: arguments
-non-participant roles: adjuncts.

Only participant roles or arguments are relevant for verbal thematic grids.
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6.4 Verbs and Thematic Role Grids.
6.4.3 Verbs that share the same Thematic role grid.
We quickly see in English that verbs which share the same grids form classes.

Exs.:
TRANSFER (GIVING): give, lend, pay, donate
V: <AGENT, THEME, RECIPIENT>

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6.5 Problems with Thematic roles.
There are two general problems with thematic roles:

Problem 1:
Should we delimit particular roles for each verb? If so, we reduce their utility,
and we cannot establish general relations between semantic roles and
grammatical relations.

Ex.: beat<AGENT, PATIENT > vs <BEATER, BEATEN>

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6.5 Problems with Thematic roles.
Problem 2:
• How do we define theta-roles in general? That is, what semantic basis do we
have for characterizing roles?
• Dowty proposes a solution where theta-roles are not semantic primitives
but are defined in terms of entailment of the predicate. In this view, a theta-
role is a cluster of entailments about an argument position which are shared
by some verbs. Such a set of shared entailments about X (the subject) will
define the nominal which denotes X as an AGENT.
• Dowty proposes that we view the roles not as discrete categories but as
prototypes such that there would be different degrees of membership.
(Pages 159-160)
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6.6 The motivation for identifying thematic roles.
What do linguists use thematic roles for?
1. Predicting links between semantic participants and grammatical relations.
Ex.: feel <EXPERIENCER(Subject), PERCEPT (Direct object)>

This linkage is described by an “argument selection principle” (The argument

which has the greatest number of Proto-Agent properties will be the subject
and the argument which has the greatest number of Proto-Patient properties
will be the object) Pages 161-163

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6.6 The motivation for identifying thematic roles.
2. Help to characterize semantic verbal classes. For example we can identify in
English two classes of psychological verbs both of which take two arguments,
one of which is an EXPERIENCER and the other a STIMULUS.

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6.7 Causation.
- In English we witness the causative-inchoative alternation: the same verb
can occur in an intransitive form and a transitive form, so that the speaker
selects or omits a causing entity. Example:
The water boiled
Helen boiled the water

-In terms of thematic roles, these verbs allow a non-volitional cause or an

instrument as AGENT:
a. The ice melted / b. The sun melted the ice (AGENT=non-volitional cause)
a. The door opened / b. The key opened the door (AGENT=instrument)

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6.7 Causation.
- However, not all verbs allow this:
a. The buyers demolished the house / b. ?The house demolished

- In English, as the verb occurs in both cases, scholars label the “b” examples
as “lexical causatives”.
- In other languages, there are special affixes that signal causative readings,
producing “morphological causatives”.

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6.7 Causation.

Some scholars propose that these alternations show that speakers can signal
their selection within a “causal chain” in a “causal chain windowing”.

Examples:
a. The car stopped. Inchoative
b. I stopped the car. Speaker stopped the car in a normal way.
c. I made the car stop. The speaker caused the car to stop in an unusual way.
d. I had the car stopped. Implies that there are other actors in the event.

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6.8 Voice.
6.8.1 Passive voice
I. Main definition:
The category of voice adds new dimensions to the relationship between thematic roles
and grammatical relations.

• Many languages allow an opposition between active voice and passive voice.
- Billy groomed the horses. / • The horses were groomed by Billy.
• The passive sentence allows the speaker to describe the situation from the point of
view of the PATIENT rather than that of the AGENT. In some cases, passive
constructions are used to obscure the identity of the AGENT (it becomes an implied
participant):
- The horses were groomed.
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6.8 Voice.
6.8.1 Passive voice
II. Other strategies to promote the AGENT:

This strategy to promote the PATIENT and demote the AGENT can also be
done with some prepositions or with cleft and pseudo-cleft sentences
- The house stood in front of the cliff. / -The cliff stood behind the house.
- What John bought was a Ferrari. [Pseudo-cleft] / It was John who bought a
Ferrari. [Cleft]
In this kind of linguistic perspective, we can use the terms “figure”
(foregrounded element) and “ground” (backgrounded element).

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6.8 Voice.
6.8.1 Passive voice
III. Exceptions and problems:
- Typical passive sentences foreground the PATIENT, but they can also be
constructed with other roles as THEME, PERCEPT and RECIPIENT.
Ex.: This money was donated to the school (THEME)

- When the nominal occupying the object position is a prepositional phrase,

it is difficult to be foregrounded.
Ex.: This house stood on the corner / *On the corner was stood by this house

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6.8 Voice.
6.8.2 Comparing passive constructions across languages.
- Compared to other languages, English passive shows considerable variation
around its pattern. It is also common that languages often have more than
one passive construction: in English, for example, it is possible to distinguish
between be-passive and get passive

– a. Mary was shot on purpose.

– b. Mary got shot on purpose.

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6.8 Voice.
- Other languages have a special type of passive often called the impersonal
passive, which does not allow AGENT to be mentioned in the sentences.

- In most active-passive systems, the active form is usually grammatically

simpler. it has been argued that we as humans naturally view situations from
the point of view of any human being involved, and if there are none, of other
living creatures. This preference, is sometimes called an “animacy hierarchy”.

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6.8 Voice.
6.8.3 Middle voice.
- Some languages have a three-way distinction between active, passive and
middle voice.

- The use of middle voice varies from language to language but a central
feature is that middle forms emphasize that the subject is affected by the
action described by the verb. This “affectedness”, as it is often termed, can be
of several types, and we can select four typical uses as examples:
Neuters / Bodily activity and emotions / Reflexives / Auto benefactives
(examples: pages172-175)

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6.9 Classifiers and noun classes.
So far we have described how the participants in the sentence receive
semantic roles in relation to the verb.
In this section, we deal with semantic roles based on the entities referred by
the noun phrases in the sentence. This discussion is divided into classifiers and
noun classes.

6.9.1 Classifiers
Noun classifiers are morphemes or lexical words that show characteristics of the
referent of the noun.
Some prototypical classifier categories (Allan 2001):
- Shape: long, flat, round
- Arrangement: a row of, a heap of …
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6.9 Classifiers and noun classes.
6.9.2 Noun classes
Noun systems that seem to be based on semantic classifications similar to
classifiers.

Example: gender systems, in which nouns are assigned to male, female or

neuter.

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- CHAPTER SUMMARY.

“Important items”
(from curso virtual)

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- CHAPTER SUMMARY.

“Important items”
(from curso virtual)

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Next session we will:
✓ Doubts from exercises in chapter 6.
✓ Summarise chapter 7.

thanks!
mancasas@[Link]

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