Re: Theta role?

From:    Steven Williams <feurieaux@...>
> --- Carsten Becker <naranoieati@...> schrieb:
> > Again reading some of the yet unread mails, I found
> > the term "theta role" mentioned several times. What
> > is 'theta role'?
>
> 'Theta role' defines the role a noun phrase plays in a
> sentence, and there are four: the agent, experiencer,
> patient and instrument.
Not at all:  there's almost no agreement on how many theta
roles exist, even among grammarians who practice within the same
theoretical framework.  The most common argument for a single
number seems to be three (agent, theme, locus, or something along
those lines), but an even greater number of people say either
just two or somewhere between five and eight. IMO, three is the
best bet, since to my knowledge there are no languages where an
underived verb takes more than three arguments, though there are
some languages where causatives create tritransitive verbs with
four arguments (e.g. Georgian and Abkhaz both allow this,
marginally).  That fact suggests that there are no more than three
roles which can be shown to behave differently in valence changing
operations. If you're interested in the matter, Mark Baker has
written a good paper "Thematic Roles and Syntactic Theory" in
which he reviews the literature and suggests at least three
are needed.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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