Electrophysiological Evidence for Use of the Animacy Hierarchy, but not Thematic Role Assignment, During Verb Argument Processing.
The literature on the electrophysiology of language comprehension has recently seen a very prominent discussion of "semantic P600" effects, which have been observed, for example, in sentences involving an implausible thematic role assignment to an argument that would be a highly plausible filler for a different thematic role of the same verb.
Mortality, political protest, oppression, resistance and hope all played a thematic role during the class, which progressed somewhat conventionally through sections like "Abs" (the lights, by Lenore Doxsee, went dark red; just how you feel at the prospect of abs) and "Legs and Confusion".
In view of the above distinctions, a separate thematic role for the subject is proposed.
The thematic role refers to a semantic relationship between a predicate and its arguments.
The three-way distinction proposed indicates the presence of a separate thematic role from the traditional notion of Stimulus.
Computational semantics (determination of word sense and synonymy, event structure and thematic roles, time, aspect, causation, compositional semantics, scopal operators), and computational pragmatics and discourse (coherence, coreference resolution, information packaging, dialogue structure).
The subject receives two thematic roles: the theme from the matrix verb and the undergoer (patient/instrument) from the embedded verb.
In the case of IA, there is no single semantic/conceptual denominator which can subsume all the associated thematic roles (namely, a beneficiary, an instrument, a cause, a transported theme, and a causand) under the rubric.
Thematic roles associated with relevant senses of verbs and nouns such as buy, sell, purchase, acquire, acquisition, take-over, pick up, invest in, splurge on, etc., can easily be mapped to standard slots like those above.
An alternative to the three views discussed by Fine can be found, if one admits that there are ontological counterparts of the linguists' thematic roles, e.g., 'agent,'patientnt,'beneficiaryry,' and the like.
