Abstract
This paper will discuss the concept of thematic roles and their possible role in sentence comprehension. Thematic roles (Gruber, 1976; Fillmore, 1969; Jackendoff, 1972; Chomsky, 1981, 1982) relate arguments of a word, such as the object of a verb, to the meaning of that word. For instance, the object of put is a theme, or affected object; it is the entity that is moved when an act of putting takes place. Within the context of examining the role played in syntactic comprehension by thematic roles, several other issues about the structures of language comprehension will be considered.
This work was supported by a University Research Fellowship to the author at the University of Melbourne and a National Research Fellowship granted to K. I. Forster of Monash University. Thanks to Virginia Holmes, Mike Tanenhaus, Ken Forster, Jan Ratcliff and Bruce Stevenson for discussions of Australian English and interpretation of results, and particularly to Virginia Holmes for the use of laboratoru equipment.
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© 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Stowe, L.A. (1989). Thematic Structures and Sentence Comprehension. In: Carlson, G.N., Tanenhaus, M.K. (eds) Linguistic Structure in Language Processing. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2729-2_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2729-2_9
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