Thematic role properties of subjects and objects
Section snippets
The thematic role properties of subjects and objects
A critical function of human language is to specify who did what to whom. Sentences serve this function by acting as miniature plays, with actors (typically labeled by noun phrases) playing roles in the event labeled by the verb. In the parlance of linguistic theory, these actors are arguments; the role that an argument plays in an event is its thematic role. Because of their central role in the semantics of sentences, thematic roles have attracted considerable attention from both linguists (
Experiment 1: The proto-roles properties of subject and object in the presence of real transitive verbs
To date, no attempt has been made to assess the psychological validity of Dowty's Proto-Roles hypothesis—that is, to determine whether ordinary speakers will be more likely to attribute Agent properties to subjects than to objects, and more likely to attribute Patient properties to objects than to subjects. The aim of Experiment 1 is to do just that.
Experiment 2: The proto-roles properties of subject and object in the presence of real transitive verbs of different semantic types
Because it used a set of randomly selected verbs, Experiment 1 represented a strong test of Dowty's Proto-Roles hypothesis, which was meant to explain argument selection for transitive verbs in general. Despite its advantages, this method has some obvious drawbacks. Because there were few or no verbs involving causation, there was little chance that the property CAUSED DO would be rated more highly for the subject than for the object. Likewise for the property CHANGED. To verify that each
Experiment 3: The proto-roles properties of subject and object in the absence of a known verb
When the verb in a sentence is real, the subject is judged as more Agent-like than the object, and the object is judged as more Patient-like than the subject. Do these patterns hold in the absence of a real verb? Prior work on the semantics of syntactic structures (reviewed in Kako & Wagner, 2001) suggests that the answer should be yes. Experiment 3 tests this prediction by asking participants to judge the Proto-Roles properties of the subject and object of a transitive sentence with a nonsense
Experiment 4: Comparing subjects and objects on grammatically irrelevant properties
The first three experiments suggest that subjects and objects differ in their Proto-Role properties. As noted in the Introduction, Gleitman et al. (1996) have shown that subjects and objects also differ in properties related to Figure and Ground. Their findings raise an important question: Will subjects and objects differ on any set of properties about which speakers are asked? Perhaps participants in these experiments are merely trying to be cooperative, or perhaps (relatedly) they are driven
Experiment 5: Where do thematic role inferences come from?
Experiments 1 through 4 demonstrate that subjects are seen as more Agent-like than objects, and objects are seen as more Patient-like than subjects, in the presence of both known and invented verbs. This confirms the prediction that thematic role-related inferences can be drawn from syntactic structure—in this case, grammatical roles—alone, even in the absence of a verb to supply such information. When the verb is real, it is clear where these inferences come from. But where do they come from
General discussion
The aim of this paper was to test two hypotheses: (1) that the thematic role properties proposed by Dowty (1991) in his Proto-Roles hypothesis have psychological validity, and (2) that speakers can make inferences about these properties from grammatical roles alone, even in the absence of a real verb that would otherwise assign those properties to the noun phrases in the sentence. All five experiments asked participants to judge the likelihood that nonsense subjects and objects possessed the
Conclusions
The research presented in this paper verifies the psychological validity of Dowty's (1991) Proto-Roles Hypothesis, and further confirms the claim that subjects tend to be characterized by Proto-Agent properties, while objects tend to be characterized by Proto-Patient properties. The latter finding supports the claim that thematic role information can be inferred from grammatical roles alone, likely due to differences in prominence between the two arguments of the verb, as suggested by Fisher's
Acknowledgements
I thank Laura Wagner and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I also thank David January and Arpiar Saunders for their assistance in data collection.
References (83)
Thematic role assignment in context
Journal of Memory and Language
(1999)- et al.
Spatial characteristics of thematic role representations
Neuropsychologia
(1995) Structural limits on verb mapping: The role of analogy in children's interpretations of sentences
Cognitive Psychology
(1996)Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework for analogy
Cognitive Science
(1983)- et al.
Alignment in the processing of metaphor
Journal of Memory and Language
(1997) - et al.
Similar, and similar concepts
Cognition
(1996) - et al.
Affectedness and direct objects: The role of lexical semantics in the acquisition of verb argument structure
Cognition
(1991) Syntactic position and rated meaning
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior
(1967)- et al.
The semantics of syntactic structures
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
(2001) - et al.
Constructing meaning: The role of affordances and grammatical constructions in sentence comprehension
Journal of Memory and Language
(2000)
Levels of representation and units of access relevant to agrammatism
Brain and Language
Modeling the influence of thematic fit (and other constraints) in on-line sentence comprehension
Journal of Memory and Language
How could a child use syntax to learn verb semantics?
Lingua
Family resemblances: Studies in the internal structure of categories
Cognitive Psychology
Unaccusative verb production in agrammatic aphasia: The argument structure complexity hypothesis
Journal of Neurolinguistics
Semantic influences on parsing: Use of thematic role information in syntactic ambiguity resolution
Journal of Memory and Language
Canonical linking rules: Forward versus reverse linking in normally developing and specifically language-impaired children
Cognition
Statistics as principled argument
Experimental evidence for agent–patient categories in child language
Journal of Child Language
Thematic conditions on syntactic structures: Evidence from locative applicatives
Functionalist approaches to grammar
Mapping thematic roles onto syntactic functions: Are children helped by innate linking rules?
Linguistics
Linguistic determinism and the part of speech
The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
Italian syntax: A government-binding approach
Thematic roles and their role in semantic interpretation
Linguistics
Lectures on government and binding
The semantics of sentence subjects
Language and Speech
The process of rule learning: A new look
Ergativity
Thematic proto-roles and argument selection
Language
Subcategorization and syntax-based theta-role assignment
Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
The case for case
The case for case reopened
Structure and meaning in the verb lexicon: Input for a syntax-aided verb learning procedure
Language and Cognitive Processes
From form to meaning: A role for structural analogy in the acquisition of language
Advances in Child Development and Behavior
Structural limits on verb mapping: The role of abstract structure in 2.5-year-olds' interpretations of novel verbs
Developmental Science
Functional syntax and universal grammar
Frequency analysis of English usage: Lexicon and grammar
Structural alignment facilitates the noticing of differences
Memory and Cognition
Structure mapping in analogy and similarity
American Psychologist
Cited by (52)
Encoding of event roles from visual scenes is rapid, spontaneous, and interacts with higher-level visual processing
2018, CognitionCitation Excerpt :In particular, some theories of event roles hypothesize that certain components of events (e.g., contact, causation, and change of state or motion) are conceptual primitives, posited as such because they are relevant for grammar (i.e., they constrain the sentence frame in which a verb can be used; Levin, 1993; Levin & Rappaport-Hovav, 2005; Pinker, 1989; Talmy, 2000) or because they are available early on in development (Strickland, 2016). Notably, these event components are similar to features proposed in cluster-concept notions of event roles (Dowty, 1991; Kako, 2006; White et al., 2017). Although the consistency we observed in the role cost across events is broadly suggestive of generality (see Fig. 5, and Section 5.3.3), we do not believe we have a convincing way to address the precise characteristics of this generality with the current data, for the following reasons.
Electrophysiological hallmarks for event relations and event roles in working memory
2023, Frontiers in NeuroscienceAgency effects on the binding of event elements in episodic memory
2023, Quarterly Journal of Experimental PsychologyA Method for Studying Semantic Construal in Grammatical Constructions with Interpretable Contextual Embedding Spaces
2023, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics