Abstract
Thematic relations are the connections between complements of a sentence—its subject, object, prepositional phrases, and so on—and semantic functions such as Agent and Patient, which are ultimately variables of the schemata evoked by a verb or other lexical items. Thematic relations include, but are not limited to, semantic roles; they also comprise elaborate relations such as “kicker,” “drinker,” and “with his foot,” which are ingredients of our final understanding of a sentence, its cognitive representation. This book is concerned with thematic relations, in general, and the rather complex ways they are assigned to sentence constituents. In this chapter some basic notions necessary in the study of such relations are defined.
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Notes
- 1.
For example Straňáková-Lopatková et al. (Internet) for Czech; and DISC (1997) (a general dictionary including valential information) for Italian. Framenet, while including some valential information, is not properly a valency dictionary.
- 2.
This is the option of traditionally oriented dictionaries, such as DISC.
- 3.
For example, Langacker (1991).
- 4.
For example, Vilela (1992).
- 5.
For example, Straňáková-Lopatková et al. (Internet); Faulhaber (2011).
- 6.
Previously called Conceptual Semantic Relations (CSR), in Perini (2015).
- 7.
I use initial capitals (Agent) for grammatically relevant semantic roles, and quotes (“eater”) for elaborations (ETRs).
- 8.
Not totally consistently; for instance, for crumple (frame “reshaping”), the Agent is given as the “deformer”; but for kick (“cause_harm”), the “kicker” is given as the Agent.
- 9.
Spanish Experimentador ⊃ adorador, Estímulo ⊃ adorado.
- 10.
I refer to schemata with English words (mostly verbs), in capitals.
- 11.
The assignment requirement, seen in Sect. 11.4.
- 12.
I take worship to refer to ritual, not to any kind of emotional phenomenon.
- 13.
Haegeman (1991) makes do with eight thematic roles, and while she recognizes that distinguishing them is often difficult, she never mentions criteria by which the distinction might be effected. This seems to be an uninteresting question to some linguists.
- 14.
To give an important example, Culicover and Jackendoff (2005) start from fundamentally the same idea, and develop it for syntax.
- 15.
References
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Perini, M.A. (2019). Introduction. In: Thematic Relations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28538-8_1
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