In Generative grammar, (in particular Government and binding theory and the Standard Theory of Transformational Grammar) a theta role or θ-role is the formal device for representing syntactic argument structure (the number and type of noun phrases) required syntactically by a particular verb. Linguistic Typology is an international Peer-reviewed journal in the field of Linguistic typology, founded in 1997 Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world (see Linguistic typology) that groups languages according to their common morphological structures In morphological typology (in linguistics an isolating language (also analytic language) is any Language in which words are composed of A synthetic language, in Linguistic typology, is a Language with a high Morpheme -per- word ratio Polysynthetic languages are highly Synthetic languages ie languages in which words are composed of many Morphemes Definition The degree of For fusion in Word formation, see Compound (linguistics. A fusional language (also called inflecting language) is a An agglutinative language is a Language that uses Agglutination extensively most Words are formed by joining Morphemes together Morphology is the field of Linguistics that studies the internal structure of words In Linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the system used to distinguish between the arguments of Transitive verbs and those of Intransitive A nominative-accusative Language (or simply accusative language) is one that marks the direct object of Transitive verbs distinguishing them An ergative-absolutive Language (or simply ergative language is a language that treats the argument (" subject " of an Intransitive Austronesian alignment, commonly known as the Philippine- or Austronesian -type voice system, is a typologically unusual Morphosyntactic alignment An active-stative language, or active language for short is one in which the sole argument of an Intransitive verb is sometimes marked in the same way A tripartite language, also called an ergative-accusative language, is one that treats the subject of an intransitive verb the subject of a transitive verb and the object A direct-inverse language is a language where clauses with transitive verbs can be expressed either using a direct or an inverse construction The syntactic pivot is the Verb argument around which sentences "revolve" in a given Language. In Linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the different ways in which languages arrange the constituents of their sentences relative to each other and the systematic In Linguistics, a VO language is a language in which the Verb typically comes before the object (thus including SVO, VOS and In Linguistic typology, subject-verb-object ( SVO) is a sentence structure where the subject comes first the Verb second and the object Verb Subject Object ( VSO) is a term in Linguistic typology. It represents one type of languages when classifying languages according to the sequence of these In Linguistic typology, Verb Object Subject or Verb Object Agent - commonly used in its abbreviated form VOS or VOA - represents the language-classification In Linguistics, an OV language is a language in which the object comes before the Verb. In Linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and Verb of a sentence appear or usually Object Subject Verb (OSV or Object Agent Verb (OAV is one of the permutations of expression used in Linguistic typology. Object Verb Subject (OVS or Object Verb Agent (OVA is one of the Permutations of expression used in Linguistic typology, although it is rare among Time Manner Place (TMP describes one possible ordering of Adpositional phrases in sentences Place Manner Time is a term used in Linguistic typology to state the general order of Adpositional phrases in a language's sentences "to the store by car In Theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of Syntax. Government and binding is a theory of Syntax in the tradition of Transformational grammar developed principally by Noam Chomsky in the 1980s A syntactic verb argument, in Linguistics, is a Phrase that appears in a relationship with the Verb in a Clause. For example, the verb put requires three arguments (i. e. , it is trivalent). In Linguistics, verb valency or valence refers to the number of arguments controlled by a verbal predicate. The formal mechanism for implementing this requirement is based in theta roles. The verb put is said to "assign" three theta roles. This is coded in a theta grid associated with the lexical entry for the verb. The correspondence between the theta grid and the actual sentence is accomplished by means of a bijective filter on the grammar known as the Theta Criterion. In Syntax, the theta criterion (in its original form states that in a grammatical sentence every Theta role that a Verb can assign must be realized by Early conceptions of theta roles include (Fillmore 1968) (Fillmore called theta roles "cases") and (Gruber 1965)
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Theta Roles and Thematic Relations
The term Theta Role is often used interchangeably with the term thematic relations (particularly in mainstream generative grammar — for an exception see (Carnie 2006)). In Linguistics, thematic relations express the meaning that a Noun phrase plays with respect to the action or state described by a sentence's verb The reason for this is simple: theta roles typically reference thematic relations. In particular theta roles are often referred to by the most prominent thematic relation in them. For example, a common theta role is the primary or external argument. Typically, although, not always, this theta role maps to a noun phrase which bears an agent thematic relation. As such, the theta role is called the "agent" theta role. This often leads to confusion between the two notions. The two concepts, however, can be distinguished in a number of ways.
- Thematic relations express the semantic relations that the entities denoted by the noun phrases bear towards the action or state denoted by the verb. By contrast, Theta roles are a syntactic notion about the number, type and placement of obligatory arguments. For instance, in the sentence Fergus ate the kibble, the fact that there are two arguments (Fergus and the kibble) and Fergus must be capable of volition and doing the action and the kibble must be something that can be eaten is a fact about theta roles (the number and type of the argument). The actual semantic type of the argument is described by the thematic relation.
- Not all theoretical approaches use theta roles. Theta roles are largely limited to the Chomskyan versions of Generative grammar and Lexical-functional grammar. Lexical functional grammar (LFG is a Grammar framework in Theoretical linguistics, a variety of Generative grammar. Many other approaches such as Functional Grammar, and dependency grammar refer to thematic relations directly without an intermediate step in theta roles.
- Only arguments of the verb bear theta roles; optional adjunct modifiers — even if they are prepositional phrases (PPs) such as on Friday or noun phrases (NPs) like "yesterday" — don't take theta roles. But almost all NPs (except expletives) express thematic relations. The word expletive is currently used in three senses syntactic expletives, expletive attributives, and "bad language".
- An argument can bear only one theta role, but can take multiple thematic relations. For example, in "Susan gave Bill the paper. " Susan bears both Agent and Source thematic relations, but it only bears one theta role (the external "agent" role).
- Thematic relations are properties of nouns and noun phrases. Theta roles can be assigned to any argument including noun phrases, prepositional phrases and embedded clauses. Thematic relations are not assigned to embedded clauses, and prepositions typically mark the thematic relation on an NP.
One common way of thinking about theta roles is that they are bundles of thematic relations associated with a particular argument positions. (Carnie 2006)
Theta Grids & The Theta Criterion
Theta roles are stored in a verb's theta grid. Grids typically come in two forms. The simplest and easiest to type is written as an ordered list between angle brackets. The argument associated with the external argument position (which typically ends up being the subject in active sentences) is written first and underlined. The theta roles are named by the most prominent thematic relation that they contain. In this notation, the theta grid for a verb such as give is <agent, theme, goal>.
The other notation (see for example the textbook examples in (Haegeman 1994) and (Carnie 2006)) separates the theta roles into boxes, in which each column represents a theta role. The top row represents the names of the thematic relations contained in the theta role. In some work -- e. g. , (Carnie 2006), this box also contains information about the category associated with the theta role. This mingles theta-theory with the notion of subcategorization. In syntactic linguistic theory the subcategorization frame of a Word is the number and types of syntactic arguments that it co-occurs with (i The bottom row gives a series of indexes which are associated with subscripted markers in the sentence itself which indicate that the NPs they are attached to have been assigned the theta role in question.
| Agent source DP |
theme DP |
goal PP |
| i | j | k |
When applied to the sentence [S[NP Susan]i gave [NP the food]j [PPto Reggie]k the indices mark that Susan is assigned the external theta role of agent/source, the food is assigned the theme role, and to Reggie is assigned the goal role.
The Theta Criterion (or θ-criterion) is the formal device in Government and Binding Theory for enforcing the one to one match between arguments and theta roles. This acts as a filter on the D-structure of the sentence. In Linguistics, and especially the study of Syntax, the deep structure of a linguistic expression is a theoretical construct that seeks to unify several related structures If an argument fails to have the correct match between the number of arguments (typically NPs, PPs, or embedded clauses) and the number of theta roles. (Chomsky 1981, p. 36)'s formulation is:
The theta criterion Each argument bears one and only one θ-role, and each θ-role is assigned to one and only one argument.
Although it is often not explicitly stated, it should be noted that adjuncts are excluded from the theta criterion.
Thematic Hierarchies
Drawing on observations based in typological cross-linguistic comparisons of languages (Fillmore 1968), linguists in the relational grammar (RG) tradition (e. g. (Perlmutter & Postal 1984) observed that particular thematic relations and theta roles map on to particular positions in the sentence. For example, in unmarked situations agents map to subject positions, themes onto object position, and goals onto indirect objects. In RG, this is encoded in the Universal Alignment Hypothesis (or UAH), where the thematic relations are mapped directly into argument position based on the following hierarchy: Agent < Theme < Experiencer < Others. Mark Baker adopted this idea into GB theory in the form of the Universal Theta Assignment Hypothesis (or UTAH) (Baker 1988). A different approach to the correspondence is given in (Hale & Keyser 1993) and (Hale & Keyser 2001), where there are no such things as underlying theta roles or even thematic relations. Instead, the interpretive component of the grammar identifies the semantic role of an argument based on its position in the tree.
Argument Structure in other formal approaches
Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG)
Lexical-functional grammar (LFG) ((Falk 2001) and (Bresnan 2001) is perhaps the most similar to Chomskyan approaches in implementing theta-roles. Lexical functional grammar (LFG is a Grammar framework in Theoretical linguistics, a variety of Generative grammar. However, LFG uses three distinct layers of structure for representing the relations or functions of arguments: θ-structure, a-structure (argument structure) and f-structure (functional structure) which expresses grammatical relations. These three layers are linked together using a set of intricate linking principles. Thematic relations in the θ-structure are mapped onto a set of positions in the a-structure which are tied to features [+o] (roughly "object") and [±r] (roughly "restricted" meaning it is marked explicitly by a preposition or a case marking). Themes map to [-r], second themes map to [+o] and non-themes map to [-o]. These features then determine how the arguments are mapped to specific grammatical functions in the sentence. The first [-o] argument is mapped to the SUBJ (subject) relation. If there is no [-o] argument then the first [-r] argument is mapped to the SUBJ relation. If neither of these apply, then you add the plus value ([+r] or [+o]) to the feature structure and apply the following mappings: [-o,-r]: SUBJ, [+o, -r]: Object (OBJ), [-o,+r]: prepositional marked oblique (OBLθ), [+o, +r]: prepositionally marked object (OBJθ). The these mappings are further constrained by the following constraints:
Function argument biuniqueness Each a-structure role corresponds to a unique f-structure function, and each f-structure function corresponds to a unique a-structure role
The Subject Condition Every verb must have a SUBJ
F-structures are further constrained by the following two constraints which do much of the same labor as the θ-criterion:
Coherence requires that every participant in the f-structure of a sentence must be mentioned in a-structure (or in a constituting equation) of a predicate in its clause.
Completeness an f-structure for a sentence must contain values for all the grammatical functions mentioned in a-structure.
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG)
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) (for a textbook introduction see (Sag, Wasow & Bender 2005)) does not use theta roles per se, but divides their property into two distinct feature structures. Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG is a highly lexicalized non-derivational Generative grammar theory developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag The number and category are indicated by a feature called ARG-STR. This feature is an ordered list of categories that must cooccur with a particular verb or predicate. For example the ARG-STR list of the verb give is <NP, NP, PP>. The semantic part of theta roles (i. e. the thematic relations) are treated in a special set of semantic restriction (RESTR) features. These typically express the semantic properties more directly than thematic relations. For example, the semantic relations associated with the arguments of the verb give are not agent, theme and goal, but giver, given, givee.
Approaches that eschew theta roles
Many approaches to grammar including Construction Grammar and the Simpler Syntax Model (Culicover & Jackendoff 2005) (see also Jackendoff's earlier work on argument structure and semantics, including (Jackendoff 1983) and (Jackendoff 1990)) claim that theta roles (and thematic relations) are neither a good way to represent the syntactic argument structure of predicates nor of the semantic properties that they reveal. The term construction grammar (CxG covers a "family" of theories or models of Grammar that are based on the idea that the primary unit of grammar is the They argue for more complex and articulated semantic structures (often called Lexical-conceptual structures) which map onto the syntactic structure.
Similarly, most typological approaches to grammar, functionalist theories (such as Functional grammar and Role and reference grammar (Van Valin & La Polla 1993), and Dependency grammar do not use theta roles, but they may make reference to thematic relations and grammatical relations or their notational equivalents. Functional Grammar is a model of Grammar motivated by functions. Role and Reference Grammar (RRG is a model of Grammar developed by William Foley and Robert Van Valin Jr Dependency grammar (DG is a class of syntactic theories developed by Lucien Tesnière. In Linguistics, thematic relations express the meaning that a Noun phrase plays with respect to the action or state described by a sentence's verb In Linguistics, grammatical functions or ( grammatical relations) refer to syntactic relationships between Parts of speech such as subject These are usually related to one another directly using principles of mapping.
References
- Bresnan, Joan (2001). Joan Wanda Bresnan (born August 22, 1945) is Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. Lexical Functional Syntax. Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-20973-5
- Carnie, Andrew (2006) Syntax: A Generative Introduction. Andrew Carnie (born April 19, 1969) is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. Blackwell.
- Chomsky, Noam. Avram Noam Chomsky (noʊm ˈtʃɑmski born December 7 1928 is an American linguist, Philosopher, cognitive scientist, Political 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Mouton.
- Culicover, Peter and Ray Jackendoff (2005) Simpler Syntax. Peter W Culicover is Professor of Linguistics at Ohio State University. Ray Jackendoff (born January 23, 1945) is an American Linguist. Oxford University press.
- Dowty, David. David Dowty is a linguist known primarily for his work in semantic and syntactic theory and especially in Montague grammar and Categorial grammar 1979. Word meaning and Montague grammar. The semantics of verbs and times in Generative Semantics and in Montague's PTQ: Synthese Language Library. Dordrecht: Reidel.
- Falk, Yehuda N. (2001). Lexical-Functional Grammar: An Introduction to Parallel Constraint-Based Syntax. CSLI. ISBN 1-57586-341-3
- Fillmore, Charles. Charles J Fillmore (born 1929 is an American linguist, and an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of California Berkeley. 1968. The Case for Case. In Universals in Linguistic Theory, eds. Emmon Bach and R. T. Harms. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
- Fillmore, Charles. 1971. Types of lexical information. In Semantics. An interdisciplinary reader in philosophy, linguistics and psychology, eds. D. Steinberg and L. Jacobovitz: Cambridge University Press.
- Gruber, Jeffrey. 1965. Studies in lexical relations, MIT: Ph. D.
- Hale, Kenneth and Keyser, Samuel J. 1993. Kenneth Locke Hale ( August 15, 1934 – October 8, 2001) was a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who Samuel Jay Keyser (born 1935 is an American theoretical linguist who is an authority on the history and structure of the English language and on linguistic approaches to On argument structure and the lexical expression of syntactic relations. In Hale, K. and S. J. Keyser, eds. The view from Building 20: Essays in honor of Sylvain Bromberger. Cambridge: MIT Press.
- Hale, K. and Keyser, S. J. 2001. Prolegomenon to a Theory of Argument Structure. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 39. Cambridge: MIT Press.
- Harley, Heidi. Heidi B Harley (born September 26, 1969) is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. 2007. Thematic Roles. In Patrick Hogan, ed. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Cambridge University Press.
- Jackendoff, Ray. 1983. Semantics and cognition. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press.
- Jackendoff, Ray. 1990. Semantic structures. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press.
- David Perlmutter and Paul Postal. Paul M Postal (born November 10, 1936 in Weehawken, New Jersey) is an American linguist and member of the faculty of New York 1984. The 1-advancement exclusiveness law. In David Perlmutter and Carol G. Rosen (ed. ) Studies in Relational Grammar 2. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. pp. 81-125.
- Reinhart, Tanya (2002). Tanya Reinhart (טניה ריינהרט July 1943 – March 17, 2007) was an Israeli linguist who wrote frequently on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict The Theta System: An Overview. Theoretical Linguistics 28(3), 229-290, as well as comment articles in the same issue. Theoretical Linguistics is an international Peer-reviewed journal of Theoretical linguistics published by Mouton de Gruyter. A version of Reinhart's paper is accessible online
- Sag, Ivan, Thomas Wasow and Bender (2005) An Introduction to Formal Syntax. Ivan Sag (born November 9, 1949 in Alliance Ohio) is a professor of Linguistics and Director of the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford CSLI Publications.
- Van Valin, Robert and Randy LaPolla (1997) Syntax: Structure meaning and function. Robert D Van Valin (born February 1, 1952) is the principal writer behind Role and Reference Grammar, a functional theory of grammar encompassing syntax Cambridge University Press.
See also
- Theta criterion
- Morphosyntactic alignment
- Valency (linguistics)
- Case grammar
- Lexical Mapping Theory, a theory of the possible mappings between thematic roles and syntactic functions
- Thematic relations
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