Thematic roles

An interlingua is a notation for representing the content of a text that abstracts away from the characteristics of the language itself and focuses on the meaning (semantics) alone. Interlinguas are typically used as pivot representations in machine translation, allowing the contents of a source text to be generated in many different target languages. Because of the complexities involved, few interlinguas are more than demonstration prototypes, and only one has been used in a commercial MT system. In this article, we define the components of an interlingua and the principal issues faced by designers and builders of interlinguas and interlingua MT systems, illustrating with examples from operational systems and research prototypes. We discuss current efforts to annotate texts with interlingua-based information.

This paper presents an analysis of the English instrumental markers with and 15 verbal use. As with other thematic roles, the semantic generalizations encoded by the role Instrument have been difficult to precisely characterize. In this study, we analyze the distinct semantic contributions of with and use, illuminating several properties of instrumental meaning. In particular, use specifies that the agent must act intentionally, which we formalize as universal quantification over possible 20 worlds within a Montague-style compositional framework. By contrast, with encodes a constraint whereby an instrument is a direct extension of the force initiated by the agent. This analysis is most consistent with theories in which thematic roles are clusters of event properties, rather than categories defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions; our analysis does not make use of Instrument as a primi-25 tive role.

Both verbs with affixes -an and i- can be used to denote the beneficiary of the sentence. They can also be used even in imperative sentences. Further studies about BF verbs cooccurring with clitic like naman is encouraged. In contrast, the affix -an in BF verbs is more imperative and more consistent than with the affix i- in relation to focusing the beneficiary. Some verbs with i- that (+direction) cannot be BF. Some
verbs with the affix i- are acceptable to be BF but ipag- is largely acceptable at least in the given verbs above. There are also some BF verbs with i- in imperative sentences denote activities of a social nature and can be analyzed deeply within their meanings. Further study of some other BF verbs with -an and i- is needed. This study may include the features of the verbs and occurrence with other categories in a sentence.

Сведение большинства инактивных высказываний к общей рубрике с "интранзитивы с эксперенциальным субъектом" допустимо для языков с бедной морфологией, но не позволяет адекватно описать таких языков как современный русский, которые различают разную степень участия субъекта в ситуации, и соответственно, разную степень контролируемости процесса. Наиболее показательно в этом плане противопоставление русских связочных предложений с предикативом на -о и глагольно-безличных предложений с винительным или дательным падежом лица. Не могут иметь трансформации с предикативом Agr(x) > Ndat - о-Pred прилагательные, обозначающие активные свойства субъекта.: *мне бешено, злобно, буйно, гневно и т.д. В этом случае избирается модель Vimp-Nacc/dat: меня бесит, злит, раздражает, что Р.
2 Элемент P обозначает сентенциальное вхождение, роль
данного элемента - СРЕДА (Env). Распределение глагольной модели и модели с именным предикативом указывает на то, что в первом случае cреда получает роль агенса, а субъект - пациенса, а в модели с предикативом роль СРЕДЫ ограничивается воздействием на аффицированность лица, а роль субъекта состоит в констатации этого воздействия. Именно для этого случая уместно зарезервировать термин "субъект состояния" .

Source prepositions are two-place predicates. They are interpreted as relational concepts because they provide components of Paths. These may be thought of as linear, oriented spaces, as in displacement or propulsion verbs, but also as much more abstract concepts, as Paths characterizing verbs of perception, communication, ruling and other forms of action at a distance. Two central problems of Source prepositions are addressed in this chapter: (i) the same prepositions are used in Romance in temporal and spatial contexts, what naturally calls for a unification analysis; and (ii), a considerable variation among Source prepositions systems in Romance is attested, since languages may choose between two, three or four different prepositions expressing Source. A set of grammatical criteria is then needed in order to account for the relevant choices. As regards (i), a number of parallelisms between temporal and spatial Sources are introduced, including the view of duration as a Temporal Path. As regards (ii), variation in the Romance systems of Source preposition is centered in two parameters: (in)visibility of the full Path after the initial point, and (un)boundedness of the Path itself.

Thematic-role assignment is influenced by several classes of cues during sentence comprehension, ranging from morphological exponents of syntactic relation such as case and agreement to probabilistic cues such as prosody. The effect of these cues cross-linguistically varies, presumably reflecting their language-specific robustness in signaling thematic roles. However, language-specific frequencies are not mapped onto the cue strength in a one-to-one fashion. The present article reports two eye-tracking studies on Hungarian examining the interaction of case and prosody during the processing of case-unambiguous (Experiment 1) and case-ambiguous (Experiment 2) clauses. Eye fixations reveal that case is a strong cue for thematic role assignment, but stress only enhances the effect of case in case-unambiguous clauses. This result differs from findings reported for Italian and German in which case initial stress reduces the expectation for subject-first clauses. Furthermore, the sentence ...

In this paper we propose a syntactic analysis of dative DPs in ditransitive constructions in Russian, answering three questions: (I) what semantic roles the indirect object realizes; (II) how it is syntactically ordered with respect to the direct object realizing the theme argument, and (III) how the first two issues are related to the morphological encoding of the indirect object, as a PP or as a morphologically case-marked DP. Addressing first question (II) we show that two kinds of syntactic hierarchies between the two internal arguments of a ditransitive configuration coexist, and that there are two sorts of datives that are hierarchically higher than the theme: those that can reconstruct and those that cannot. We then establish an interpretative correlation between these two types of dative DP, showing that the former is locational and the latter is not, providing the answer to question (I) and elucidating what underlies the morphological similarity, question (III). The interpretative and syntactic differences between scrambled and base generated high datives lead us to claim that in Russian, dative ditransitives have two distinct underlying structures that are not derivationally related. A scalar approach to event structure enables us to pinpoint the interpretative correlate of each type of dative (locational vs. non-locational) and provides a conceptual argument in favor of a non-synonymy non-derivational approach we pursue here: a path scale encoding event schema cannot be transformed into a different scale based event schema due to movement of the dative DP. Finally, the scalar approach allows us to identify the lexical correlates of a possessive interpretation of the high dative vs. a more beneficiary-like interpretation. Extent scales allow the former whereas property and path scales facilitate the other.

Reciprocals are characterized by a crossover of thematic roles within a single clause. So, in John and Mary wash each other, each of John and Mary is both washer and washed, both agent and patient. This often plays havoc with the process of mapping to argument structure, which in regular clauses assumes a unique thematic role for each argument. The competing pressures to distinguish and merge the reciprocating argument(s) are resolved by different languages in very illuminating ways that, at the same time, often create special argument configurations not found in other clause types. While some languages either treat reciprocals as clearly transitive (like Warlpiri or English), or clearly intransitive (like Gumbaynggir or Yimas), other languages adopt a mixed or ambivalent solution. In this paper we examine a range of transitivity mismatches in reciprocal constructions including: (a) monovalent clauses with a single ergative NP; (b) mismatches between case marking and the number of a...

The theoretical and experimental work presented in this thesis investigates the spray/load and dative alternations. The purpose is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the alternations in terms of their
syntactic structures and to account for how contextual information drives differences in the linear order of their VP arguments. This analysis shows that the syntactic structures of the spray/load and dative alternations are identical; each variant in an alternation is characterised by one of two available structures proposed in Janke and Neeleman (2012). Each structure is shown to respect a novel thematic hierarchy that is based on the value of binary feature clusters (Reinhart, 2000) rather than by direct reference to semantic labels. The choice of a particular structure is demonstrated to be affected by the non-semantic context in which the spray/load or dative sentence is generated. This is
a consequence of the limited processing capacity of Working Memory and the allocation of attentional resources to a stimulus. Experimental data from an as yet untested variable of the visual context - the
egocentric perception of distance - is found to interact with word order preferences of the alternations. I conclude that non-semantic contextual information interacts with the encoding of an event which ultimately has consequences for syntactic choices.

The present dissertation is a defense of the hypothesis that word formation is syntactic. As its title indicates, two lines of investigations are pursued. The first one has to do with clause structure, in which we examine the role of functional heads in determining grammatical processes in both Standard Arabic (SA) and Moroccan Arabic (MA). The functional heads investigated are: VoiceP, vP and NegP. As far as VoiceP and vP are concerned, we explore their role in introducing arguments into verbal argument structures. The effects of the split VP structure proposed are further adumbrated with data from double object constructions, location verbs, causatives, anticausatives and passives. As for NegP, we show how it interacts with TP and CP to derive Subject-Neg agreement and the temporal interpretation associated with lam and lan in SA. We take these two properties to be explained using Chomsky’s (2005) Feature Inheritance mechanism.

The other formal line of investigation concerns word formation, in which we investigate the mechanisms whereby morphologically simplex and complex words are formed. The claim we defend here is that the structure below the word level and the structure above the word level are derived using the same formal syntactic rules. For example, negation in MA supports the assumption that word structure and syntactic structure share the same general formal properties. In this regard, we provide an analysis of the distribution of the discontinuous negative morpheme and the co-occurrence restriction that holds between {-ʃ} and Negative Polarity Items. For the former, it is shown that the distribution of negation supports the existence of syntactic phenomenon at the word level, namely the existence of phase-by-phase Spell-Out. For the latter, a general context-sensitive constraint is developed to capture this generalization, which is shown to be an instance of Syntactic Haplology.

Space, time, and causality provide a natural structure for organizing our experience. These abstract categories allow us to think relationally in the most basic sense; understanding simple events requires one to represent the spatial relations among objects, the relative durations of actions or movements, and the links between causes and effects. The present fMRI study investigates the extent to which