Talk:Theta role

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 * Thematic relation was split from this article after a merger between Thematic role and Theta role. For more discussion that may be relevant here, see also Talk:Thematic role.

June 2007, complete rewrite of this article
First, some history (some of which can be gleened from the discussion below): There were originally two articles Thematic role and Theta role. These largely overlapped in content (with the theta role article actually describing thematic relations). The two articles were merged. Neither article was properly referenced and the definitions were fairly inaccurate. But the merger into theta roles was unfortunate, since the article already mixed up the two notions.

I've completely rewritten this article so it is actually about theta roles and not about thematic relations. I have also created a new article on Thematic relations that now contains an edited and corrected version of the original contents of this entry. The two entries should now (hopefully!) be distinct.

This entry still needs to have the reference section properly wikified to the proper Harvard Citation template. The article on thematic relations still needs some proper referencing done in the text, as well as some wikification.

In addition to the above, I have also changed the redirect on Thematic role so that it allows the reader to point to this article or to Thematic relations. If people notice links to this article that should go to thematic relations please fix them!AndrewCarnie 21:14, 19 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks! :-D —RuakhTALK 22:38, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Do we really need two separate articles - thematic role and theta role?
Do we really need two separate articles - thematic role and theta role? Boraczek 21:44, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Maybe put a merge tag on thematic role? Right now that article is somewhat messy, while this one is written much more clearly (perhaps because I wrote it ;). Very Verily  22:34, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * I agree, this article is much better. Good job!
 * Another problem to solve: I'm afraid this article (theta role) is inconsistent with the article Morphosyntactic alignment. The article theta role describes "experiencer" in semantic terms, while the article Morphosyntactic alignment says that the main argument of an intransitive verb is "experiencer" with no regard to the meaning. In the sentence "John went to San Francisco" we have an intransitive verb, so according to the second definition "John" is an experiencer, but semantically "John" is an agent. Boraczek 23:39, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Hm, well this is a somewhat unstable area of linguistics, so such discrepancies aren't too surprising, but my humble opinion is that the Morphosyntactic alignment article needs some work. It's certainly hard to believe that in John screamed or Fido ran away that 'John' and 'Fido' are experiencers, even though they'd be marked absolutive in an ergative language.  My understanding (and I don't have references handy) is that the threefold S/A/P (subject/agent/patient) distinction is preferred these days, where S can be either 'Sa' (an agent-like subject) or 'So' (an object-like subject, as in The window broke), but this latter distinction is not usually case-marked, hence the catch-all (but hard to define) 'S'.  Then we say that in accusative languages  S and A fall together, and in ergative ones S and P do.  Well, I'm not up for taking a stab at working on the alignment article just yet, but it being Wikipedia I'm sure it will happen one way or another. Very Verily  19:40, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC) (P.s., sorry it took so long to reply; when I tried to reply last time the database was down and then I just forgot about it....)


 * Thematic role and Theta role denote the same concept. Actually the Greek letter theta is used to indicate the theme. My suggestion is that we move Theta role to Thematic role and provide a redirect here. Hirzel 11:15, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Is this not just a convoluted term for "theme" in linguistics? - Centrx 16:46, 21 April 2006 (UTC)


 * My point exactly. "Theta role" is just a condensed form of the term. There's no point in naming the encyclopedic article after the linguistic shorthand. I'll list the article at RM.
 * Peter Isotalo 09:08, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Not the same thing
Hi All,

I strongly disagree. Thematic relations (not roles) and Theta Roles are totally different things. Thematic relations are semantic relations like "theme", "agent" etc. Theta roles are syntactic objects, which correspond to syntactic argument structure. Theta roles reference thematic relations (I haven't yet fixed the article so it says this... but it's the way Gruber intended the terms), but they are not synonymous. AndrewCarnie

Please don't merge, They're not the same!
Hello,

Though these two concepts are easily confused even by beginner linguistics/syntax students, they are not the same. Thematic roles/relations are a semantic issue, while theta-roles are a sort of abstraction developed by syntacticians the be able to determine thematic assignments in the absence of a full lexical/semantic theory. In literature these terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but in the linguistics domain they are not.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Promethean (talk • contribs).

This is not a unitary concept
The notion of theta-role comes from formal Chomskyan syntax. In functional linguistics the terms thematic role and semantic role are used instead. This article does not adopt a NPOV with regard to this disagreement.

Some of the differences are significant. For example, S, A and O may be considered to be theta roles in formal syntax, but they are considered ot be grammatical roles in functionalist syntax (and thus have semantic roles too: for example, an A might be an agent, experiencer, source etc.; an O is not always a patient; etc.)

however, more clearing up than I have time for is needed.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 82.33.156.75 (talk • contribs).

Merge from Thematic role
I just completed the merge from Thematic role. Reading the discussion on the merge was quite confusing. I know everyone doesn't agree with the merge, but neither article cited sources for their statements. Hopefully as a merged article the development will progress more quickly. Anyone who believes a section of this new article should stand on its own please improve the section here first by citing sources and start a discussion on this talk page when you have facts to support your argument. Alan.ca 08:33, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Proposal to resplit these
I'm baffled by the merger of thematic roles with theta roles. I'm an associate professor of Syntactic Theory at the University of Arizona. Ph.D from MIT in 1995. I've published a major textbook on syntactic theory (Carnie 2006). I can assure you all, these are different things. Thematic roles are semantic notions; theta roles are representations of syntactic argument positions. It is true that many generative syntacticians use the terms interchangeably, but that's sloppiness, not synonymy. The term theta role isn't used outside of generative approaches, but the term thematic relation is. I'm willing to rewrite this article (and the one on thematic roles) if we can split them apart again. Here's how I envision it: The bulk of this article will be moved to Thematic roles, changing all the incorrect references of theta role to thematic relations. There will be a crossreference to this article regarding theta roles. This article (theta roles) will be completely rewritten a shorter one outlining the basic idea of argument positions tied to thematic relations and a brief explanation to the theta criterion. I'll probably also add a few lines about other approaches (LFG a-structure, HPSG Arg-STR), as well as the newer theories which link theta roles to position (i.e. Hale and Keyser) or to theta features. The current article also mixes up grammatical relations (A, S, O -- which are wrongly defined by the way) with thematic relations. I can fix this too. But I'm only going to do this if there is a consensus to split this back into thematic relations and theta roles. I'm not going to waste my time if someone is just going to switch it back. AndrewCarnie


 * I'd support that. It seems that the problem is that theta role was originally written incorrectly, in a way that made it sound synonymous with thematic role. If you can rewrite them in a way that makes the difference clear, please do. :-) —RuakhTALK 02:30, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Recipient is more important than instrument
I think recipient is important enough to be included with instrument in the theta-roles illustrated by the example sentences, as it is often more central to the verb as one of the arguments of a ditransitive verb than the more oblique role of "instrument". Should a sentence be added, or should the existing ones be modified to accommodate that? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 169.229.64.31 (talk • contribs).

Theme
The article says "Theme: is the recipient of an action but does not change its state (e.g. Bill gave Mary a present)."

However, I've always understood that in this sentence, 'present' is the theme and Mary the recepient. This is also what the Theta-role stuff says. Jalwikip 16:15, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Fragment...
"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. "

....not a sentence.... 134.93.59.195 (talk) 20:11, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Volition and capable-of-being-eaten are syntactic qualities?
In the article:

"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)."

I thought that "capable of volition" and "something that can be eaten" were semantic qualities, not syntactic quantities. Not being a syntactician or linguist myself, when I read the "type... of obligatory arguments" I assumed that meant what type of phrase: NP (DP), PP, etc.

Can I get a clarification? --Robert.Baruch (talk) 22:04, 1 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Theta roles directly refer to hematic relations (the semantic type specified in the theta role), so a theta role refers to the thematic relation (say agent) within it. Comhreir (talk) 03:20, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Too dense
I did not understand this article. I suppose I probably could if I followed every link in it and came back and read it several times, but that would be several days’ work and I doubt if it would help me learn and understand any real-world languages. The article is densely written. It is full of jargon, some undefined. It relies heavily on symbols, some undefined. (One example even has unbalanced brackets.) In every paragraph, my eyes glazed over. No doubt the jargon and symbols are well known to linguists, but I bet 99% of Wikipedia users have never taken a course in linguistics.

It compares θ-roles to other theories. I get the impression that theoretical linguistics is full of many different mutually inconsistent theories trying to explain languages at some elevated abstract level. It left me more confused than before I read it. In the future, if an article is marked "category:theoretical linguistics", I will skip it. Vita brevis est. — Solo Owl (talk) 03:56, 22 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I get the impression that theoretical linguistics is full of many different mutually inconsistent theories trying to explain languages at some elevated abstract level. That is an accurate description of the state of theoretical linguistics, so you haven't misunderstood on that count. Still, I agree with you that the article could be clearer. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 04:15, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

I also did not get much from the article. Please rewrite this and meditate the respective notions in a simple (not simplistic) way. For example:

"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"

could be replaced by:

"The theta grid corresponds with the actual meaning of the sentence by a one-to-one relationship known as the Theta Criterion"

Try not to use passive voice and replace difficult words like bijective (even the spell check machine doesn't recognise it) with the "one-to-one" expression, which is more commonly used and exactly as accurate. (Read George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" 1946, for more ). The reason I adore Wikipedia is because it has an almost magical way to describe difficult notions in an easy to understand way. Please expand this philosophy to this article by rewriting it. Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.128.109.253 (talk) 16:10, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Fergus ate the kibble
I don't understand how volition fits into this example. "The solvent ate the plastic" seems like the same thing to me. Can you make it a bit clearer? Wnt (talk) 12:50, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

The words "predicate" and "object" have multiple possible meanings, which confuses
t appears that, in addition to the two definitions of "predicate" discussed in the first paragraph in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_(grammar), the current article introduces het another one: noun or adjective or preposition or verb. I must say this confused me a lot.


 * 1) a thing or being;
 * 2) a purpose;
 * 3) or a direct or indirect object?

I think many terms used are overloaded in that they carry with them multiple possible meanings.

The article would, I think, benefit from a list of clear definitions for the most prominent words used in it.Redav (talk) 13:09, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

List of Theta roles?
I found this random article circa 2002 that describes many theta roles. Some are introduced in the article (agent, theme, goal) but others are left unmentioned (possessor, trigger, constructum, location, etc). I think it would be nice to have a consised list of all of them. NotHasn&#39;t (talk) 02:41, 4 January 2024 (UTC)