Thematic Roles and Semantics

Thematic Roles and Language Comprehension1

Thematic Roles and Syntactic Structure*

One central task for any theory of grammar is to solve the so-called “linking problem”: the problem of discovering regularities in how the participants of an event are expressed in surface grammatical forms and explaining those regularities. Suppose that one adopts a broadly Chomskyan perspective, in which there is a distinction between the language faculty and other cognitive faculties, includ...

Thematic Roles – Universal , Particular , and Idiosyncratic Aspects

Thematic Roles (or Theta-Roles) are theoretical constructs that account for a variety of well known empirical facts, which are more or less clearly delimited. In other words, Theta-Roles are not directly observable, but they do have empirical content that is open to empirical observation. The objective of the present paper is to sketch the nature and content of Theta-Roles, distinguishing their...

Thematic Roles, Word Order, and Deeniteness

Thematic roles, markedness alignment and processing complexity.

Two experiments used eye-tracking during reading to investigate the role of the consistency of the relative markedness alignment of noun phrases (NPs) in the processing of complex sentences in Korean. To do so, the animacy of the first NP was varied in both experiments to manipulate the relative markedness of NPs. In addition, case markings of the second NP (nominative vs. accusative) were mani...