Семантикалық рөлдер дәстүріндегі тематикалық рольдер

thematic roles in the semantic tradition

Theta roles are the names of the participant roles associated with a predicate: the predicate may be a verb, an adjective, a preposition, or a noun. If an object is in motion or in a steady state as the speakers perceives the state, or it is the topic of discussion, it is called a theme. The participant is usually said to be an argument of the predicate. In generative grammar, a theta role or θ role is the formal device for representing syntactic argument structure—the number and type of noun phrases—required syntactically by a particular verb. For example, the verb put requires three arguments (i. e., it is trivalent). The formal mechanism for implementing a verb's argument structure is codified as theta roles. The verb put is said to "assign" three theta roles. This is coded in a theta grid associated with the lexical entry for the verb. The correspondence between the theta grid and the actual sentence is accomplished by means of a bijective filter on the grammar known as the theta criterion. Early conceptions of theta roles include (Fillmore called theta roles "cases") and
Theta roles are prominent in government and binding theory and the standard theory of transformational grammar.

Drawing on observations based in typological cross linguistic comparisons of languages , linguists in the relational grammar (RG) tradition (e. g. ) observed that particular thematic relations and theta roles map on to particular positions in the sentence. For example, in unmarked situations agents map to subject positions, themes onto object position, and goals onto indirect objects. In RG, this is encoded in the Universal Alignment Hypothesis (or UAH), where the thematic relations are mapped directly into argument position based on the following hierarchy: Agent < Theme < Experiencer < Others. Mark Baker adopted this idea into GB theory in the form of the Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis (or UTAH) UTAH explains how identical thematic relationships between items are shown by identical structural relationships. A different approach to the correspondence is given in and , where there are no such things as underlying theta roles or even thematic relations. Instead, the interpretive component of the grammar identifies the semantic role of an argument based on its position in the tree.

Head driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) (for a textbook introduction, see ) does not use theta roles per se, but divides their property into two distinct feature structures. The number and category are indicated by a feature called ARG STR. This feature is an ordered list of categories that must cooccur with a particular verb or predicate. For example, the ARG STR list of the verb give is <NP, NP, PP>. The semantic part of theta roles (i. e. the thematic relations) are treated in a special set of semantic restriction (RESTR) features. These typically express the semantic properties more directly than thematic relations. For example, the semantic relations associated with the arguments of the verb give are not agent, theme and goal, but giver, given, givee.

Many approaches to grammar including construction grammar and the Simpler Syntax model (see also Jackendoff's earlier work on argument structure and semantics, including and ) claim that theta roles (and thematic relations) are neither a good way to represent the syntactic argument structure of predicates nor of the semantic properties that they reveal. They argue for more complex and articulated semantic structures (often called Lexical conceptual structures) which map onto the syntactic structure. Similarly, most typological approaches to grammar, functionalist theories (such as functional grammar and Role and Reference Grammar , and dependency grammar do not use theta roles, but they may make reference to thematic relations and grammatical relations or their notational equivalents. These are usually related to one another directly using principles of mapping.