Thematic Proto-Roles and Argument Selection

Dowty, David R.

doi:10.2307/415037

Cited by 985 publications

(933 citation statements)

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“…8 This holds e.g. for Katz (1972), Jackendoff (1990), Montague (1974), Dowty (1979) or Kamp/Reyle (1993) As a particular aspect of Grammatical Regularity, the features F i of the Theta-Role Θ i in the AS of an expression E are determined by principles and rules of different degrees of generality, which depend on the syntactic category of E, the position of Θ i in AS, and the morphological categories a given language provides. These principles and rules can be universal or language particular, and they admit for specific types of lexical idiosyncrasy.…”

Section: Necessary and Plausible Conditions On Formalizationmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…The less trivial observation is the fact already noted: The Intrinsic View does not need comparable stipulations somewhere else, but simply 33 As a way out of these difficulties, Dowty (1991) proposed the notion of Thematic Proto-Roles, which are construed as bundles of conditions, defining the actual Roles and their ranking in accordance with their syntactic assignment by means of features like animacy, dominance, control, etc. It must be noted, however, that this is an important step away from the basic contention of the Extrinsic View, as now the actual Roles are the effect a kind of semantic components.…”

Section: Comparative Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…by Katz (1972), McCawley (1971), Lakoff (1971), Dowty (1979), Jackendoff (1990), Bierwisch (1988), Wunderlich(1991), Hale/Keyser (1993) and many others. What is relevant here is not the assumption of a fixed and finite repertoire of basic elements, let alone a particular choice of it, but merely the fact that natural languages exhibit an internal organization of lexical items which is relevant for their grammatical behavior.…”

Section: Two Conceptions About Theta-rolesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Thematic roles - universal, particular, and idiosyncratic aspects

Bornkessel¹,

Schlesewsky²,

Comrie³

et al. 2006

Semantic Role Universals and Argument Linking

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Thematic Roles (or Theta-Roles) are theoretical constructs that account for a variety of well known empirical facts, which are more or less clearly delimited. In other words, Theta-Roles are not directly observable, but they do have empirical content that is open to empirical observation. The objective of the present paper is to sketch the nature and content of Theta-Roles, distinguishing their universal foundation as part of the language faculty, their language particular realization, which depends on the conditions of individual languages, and idiosyncratic properties, determined by specific information of individual lexical items.According to general agreement, including traditions of various sorts, the properties Theta-Roles are to account for have to do with the morpho-syntactic realization of semantic relations between parts of complex linguistic expressions. A rather simple case in point is given in (1), where the relation between Brecht, Villon and adaptation in (a) is semantically parallel to that between the corresponding elements in the morpho-syntactically different verbal construction (b):Theta-Roles have to account for the parallel properties as well as the differences of these relations. For general reasons, the underlying theoretical framework must meet the usual conditions of parsimony and adequacy, where (A) Parsimony requires stipulations to be minimized, and (B) Adequacy requires all relevant empirical facts to be taken into account.According (A), the theory of Theta-Roles must not set up principles or entities that follow from independently motivated theoretical assumptions, according to (B) it has to capture semantic, syntactic, morphological, and other phenomena that are related to Thematic Roles, a requirement that is clearly in need of clarification, as there is no simple and a priori delimitation of the phenomena to be included. Some preparatory observations might be helpful in this respect. Five Basic Observations(I) Interface Character: The correspondence between semantic relations and morpho-syntactic properties is not necessarily simple and uniform. Thus, the same semantic properties might be realized by different formal means, a shown in (1), and the same formal means might realize different semantic relations, as illustrated in (2), where the recipient of anziehen (dress) shows up as direct object seinen Sohn in (a) and as indirect object seinem Sohn, marked by the oblique Case in (c), while the direct object den Mantel realizes the object of the action in (b) as well as (c):(2)(a) Peter zieht seinen Sohn an (Peter dresses his son) (b) Peter zieht einen Mantel an (Peter puts a coat on) (c) Peter zieht seinem Sohn einen Mantel an (Peter helps his son to put a coat on)

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Section: Necessary and Plausible Conditions On Formalizationmentioning

confidence: 88%

Section: Comparative Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Two Conceptions About Theta-rolesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Thematic roles - universal, particular, and idiosyncratic aspects

Bornkessel¹,

Schlesewsky²,

Comrie³

et al. 2006

Semantic Role Universals and Argument Linking

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show abstract

“…In other words, agents have to be able to learn from their environments and change their behaviors in response. Some (Dowty 1991) claimed that an agent is only a proto-agent if it maintains a set of properties and behaviors but does not exhibit learning behavior.…”

Section: Agentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-objective cultural algorithms

Best

Che

Reynolds

et al. 2011

2011 IEEE Congress of Evolutionary Computation (CEC)

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“…A more finegrained account of semantic roles can be found in Frame Semantics theory and FrameNet (Fillmore et al 2003), in which semantic roles are determined by the specific event: roles such as cook, food or recipient are used to address the participants in a cooking event (frame, in their terminology). A different approach is the one found in Dowty (1991), which regards semantic roles not as clear-cut categories, but rather as sets of properties or entailments that are associated to two proto-roles (Proto-Agent and Proto-Patient). Finally, we find the framework proposed by LIRICS (Bonial et al 2011), whose aim is to develop a standard roleset suitable for the different needs of various natural language processing tasks.…”

Section: Corpus Perspective: Argument Structure and Event Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verb similarity: Comparing corpus and psycholinguistic data

Gil-Vallejo

Coll-Florit

Masalles

et al. 2018

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

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Similarity, which plays a key role in fields like cognitive science, psycholinguistics and natural language processing, is a broad and multifaceted concept. In this work we analyse how two approaches that belong to different perspectives, the corpus view and the psycholinguistic view, articulate similarity between verb senses in Spanish. Specifically, we compare the similarity between verb senses based on their argument structure, which is captured through semantic roles, with their similarity defined by word associations. We address the question of whether verb argument structure, which reflects the expression of the events, and word associations, which are related to the speakers' organization of the mental lexicon, shape similarity between verbs in a congruent manner, a topic which has not been explored previously. While we find significant correlations between verb sense similarities obtained from these two approaches, our findings also highlight some discrepancies between them and the importance of the degree of abstraction of the corpus annotation and psycholinguistic representations.

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Thematic Proto-Roles and Argument Selection

Cited by 985 publications

References 0 publications

Thematic roles - universal, particular, and idiosyncratic aspects

Thematic roles - universal, particular, and idiosyncratic aspects

Multi-objective cultural algorithms

Verb similarity: Comparing corpus and psycholinguistic data

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