Theta roles
From: | Chris Wright <dhasenan@...> |
Date: | Wednesday, March 16, 2005, 22:18 |
Hey everyone,
I've been away from the list for quite a while--mea culpa, mea maxima
culpa, paeniteo.
I'm doing a bit of research on multiple WH questions in English, and
theta roles come into prime concern. I've covered Agent, Theme, Goal,
Source, Beneficiary, Maleficiary, Experiencer, and Instrument. Is
anything else left?
For those of you who deal mainly in more realistic forms of
linguistics, well, the names should be pretty much self-explanatory.
They're the semantic roles that various participants in a sentence
play. And unlike the syntactic roles of case, they're universal. (Case
is variable, even within a language for the same verb--the English
passive construction, for instance. But you already knew that.)