Re: semantic roles

J.Barefoot wrote:

> Could someone with more linguistic knowledge than myself please explain
> semantic roles.  I have a vague idea, but I have a hard time picking out
> different roles in sentences. I'd like to make use of this in the lang I'm
> working on, but I don't really understand what I'm doing (probably because
> English is so free with them that we just don't notice differences any
> more). I don't even know what question to ask to begin. Please help!
>
> Jennifer
Well, the semantic roles that get talked about the most are the
different roles that nouns can play in a sentence.  You can chop these
up at different levels of fineness...  After all, in "John runs"
John's semantic role is "runner" and in "John walks" John's semantic
role is "walker" -- but usually a bit more generalization than that is
helpful!

Some semantic roles that are commonly talked about in the literature
include:

Agent  (Someone who is in intentional control of an event)
Experiencer (Someone who perceives or experiences something)
Patient (Someone who is affected by but not in intentional control of
an event)
Theme (Something, usually inanimate, which is moved)
Goal (Someplace or someone that a theme is moved to)

In case-based languages, these and other roles get bundled together
in cases.  For example, with most verbs, Agents and Experiencers get
lumped into the Nominative case.  But with passive verbs, Patients go
into the Accusative case.  (Things are different in Ergative languages
of course).

In languages that don't mark case on nouns, verb-marking or word
order might tell you which noun fulfills which semantic role.

Try picking a few dozen verbs from a dictionary and make up a
classification of how the subjects, objects, and direct objects of
those verbs are related to them.

There are various schemes out there in the literature which have
canonical lists of semantic roles, but there's no particular reason
they'd be better than any list of roles you could come up with on your
own.

Once you've got a list of them, think about how verbs in your
language will designate which role is which.

Generally a language will have one sort of 'generic' category, the
'subject', which will represent the only role of verbs that have only
one role.  That's easy.

The trick comes with verbs that have more than one role.  Generally
one of those roles will be picked to be the 'subject' (the 'agent'
becomes the 'subject' in accusative languages; the 'patient' becomes
the 'subject' in ergative languages; and different things can become
the 'subject' in trigger languages depending on what affix you put on
the verb, right Kristian?).

Anything else besides the 'subject' has to be marked in some special
way to tell what it is.  Usually the second argument of a verb ends up
in a catch-all category like 'direct object', and if there's a third
object to a verb it will either be another object (like English's
'indirect object') or will be indicated with a special case marker or
in a prepositional phrase.

Is that any help? :)



Ed Heil ------ edheil@postmark.net
--- http://purl.org/net/edheil ---