On the Semantic Content of the Notion of ‘Thematic Role’

Dowty, David R.

doi:10.1007/978-94-009-2723-0_3

Cited by 450 publications

(169 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Dowty, 1989, Chierchia, 1989 such as thematic relations over the event. Such a move is made in Parsons (1980).…”

Section: Methods Of Lexical Decompositionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Type Theory and Lexical Decomposition

Pustejovsky

2012

Advances in Generative Lexicon Theory

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In this paper, I explore the relation between methods of lexical representation involving decomposition and the theory of types as used in linguistics and programming semantics. I identify two major approaches to lexical decomposition in grammar, what I call parametric and predicative strategies. I demonstrate how expressions formed with one technique can be translated into expressions of the other. I then discuss argument selection within a type theoretic approach to semantics, and show how the predicative approach to decomposition can be modeled within a type theory with richer selectional mechanisms. In particular, I show how classic Generative Lexicon representations and operations can be viewed in terms of types and selection.

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“…Dowty, 1989, Chierchia, 1989 such as thematic relations over the event. Such a move is made in Parsons (1980).…”

Section: Methods Of Lexical Decompositionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Type Theory and Lexical Decomposition

Pustejovsky

2012

Advances in Generative Lexicon Theory

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“…noun phrase movement vs. verb movement), have different morphological properties and different lexical and lexical-semantic representations (see for example Dowty, 1989;Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer 1999). Therefore the hypothesis that nouns and verbs have separate and diverse representation in the human mind and that cerebral brain damage may affect one while sparing the other appears to have a strong theoretical base.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nouns and verbs in the brain: Grammatical class and task specific effects as revealed by fMRI

Berlingeri

Crepaldi

Roberti

et al. 2008

Cognitive Neuropsychology

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The wide variety of techniques and tasks used to study the neural correlates of noun and verb processing has resulted in a body of inconsistent evidence. We performed an fMRI experiment to detect grammatical class effects that generalize across tasks. Twelve subjects undertook a grammatical class switching task (GCST), in which they were presented with a noun (or a verb) and were asked to retrieve the corresponding verb (or noun), and a classical picture naming task (PNT) widely used in the previous aphasiological and imaging literature. The GCST was explicitly designed to ensure control over confounding variables, such as stimulus complexity or imageability.Conjunction analyses of the haemodynamic responses measured in the two tasks indicated a shared verb-related activation of a dorsal premotor and parietal network, pointing to a strong relationship between verb representation and action-oriented (visuo-)spatial knowledge. On the other hand, no brain area was consistently associated with nouns in both tasks. Moreover, there were task-dependent differences between noun and verb retrieval both at behavioural and at physiological level; the grammatical class that elicited the longest RTs in both tasks (i.e. verbs in the PNT and nouns in the GCST) triggered a greater activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus. Therefore, we suggest that this area reflects a general increase in task demand rather than verb processing per se. 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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“…11 At the f-level, this sign has covert phonology, i.e. it denotes the identity function on strings.…”

Section: Fact 1 From the Signs J D D And B Adv The Only Sign Dermentioning

confidence: 99%

Event Semantics and Abstract Categorial Grammar

Winter

Zwarts

2011

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. Common versions of event semantics do not naturally explain the obligatory narrow scope of existential quantification over events, or the typically event-oriented modification by adverbials. We argue that these linguistic properties reflect a distinction between overt arguments and purely semantic slots like the event argument. The distinction is naturally captured in Abstract Categorial Grammar (ACG) [1,2, 3,4], which manipulates pairs of forms and meanings, a.k.a. linguistic signs. The sign's pheno-type defines syntactic arguments and the sign's semantic type standardly defines semantic arguments. Both these concrete types are standardly derived by induction on the structure of one abstract type (category) of the sign, by assigning pheno-level and semantic types to basic abstract types. We assume that semantic event arguments are only introduced by the (basic) result type of the verb's abstract type, whose pheno-level type is standardly a string. Consequently semantic event arguments lack a correlate in the verb's pheno-type. Both narrow-scope existential quantification over events and the orientation of event modifiers follow rigorously from this assumption. Based on this architecture, we develop simple accounts of adverbial modification, nominalization and passive constructions in an ACG fragment. Basic Assumptions of Event SemanticsThe following sentence illustrates a simple case of adverbial modification. In this analysis, an intransitive verb like dance denotes a binary relation between its overt subject argument and a covert event argument. Adverbial expressions are assumed to be one-place predicates over events, which apply to the verbal event argument using conjunctive (intersective) modification. To guarantee that the whole sentence denote a proposition, Davidson introduces an existential quantifier over events, commonly referred to as an existential closure operator.

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On the Semantic Content of the Notion of ‘Thematic Role’

Cited by 450 publications

References 25 publications

Type Theory and Lexical Decomposition

Type Theory and Lexical Decomposition

Nouns and verbs in the brain: Grammatical class and task specific effects as revealed by fMRI

Event Semantics and Abstract Categorial Grammar

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