Lecture 1 Fundamentals of grammar

Lecture 13
Semantic Structure of the Sentence.
Actual Division of the Sentence
1. Semantic roles. Minimization of semantic roles.
2. Actual division of the sentence. The notion of theme and rheme.
3. Language means of expressing the theme and the rheme.
1. Semantic Roles and Semantic Configurations
A semantic role is the underlying relationship that a participant has with the
main verb in a clause. It is also known as semantic case, thematic role, theta role
(generative grammar), and deep case (case grammar). Semantic role is the actual
role a participant plays in some real or imagined situation, apart from the linguistic
encoding of those situations. If, in some real or imagined situation, someone
named John purposely hits someone named Bill, then John is the agent and Bill is the patient of the hitting event. Therefore, the semantic role of Bill is the same (patient) in both of the following sentences:
John hit Bill. Bill was hit by John.
In both of the above sentences, John has the semantic role of agent.
A set of semantic roles and an action expressed by a verb constitute a
linguistic semantic model of an extralinguistic situation and are called semantic
configuration. The set of semantic roles preset by the lexico-semantic peculiarities
of the verb makes us the role structure of the verb. The semantic configuration is
the semantic minimum of the sentence. The role structure of an actual sentence
may include roles that are not part of the semantic minimum.
The theoretical status of semantic roles in linguistic theory is still a largely
unresolved issue. For example, there is considerable doubt about whether semantic
roles should be regarded as syntactic, lexical or semantic/conceptual entities.
However, the most common understanding is that semantic roles are
semantic/conceptual elements. It should be noticed that there is no agreement
about which and how many roles are needed. This is precisely one of the major
drawbacks of the semantic role list approach. Although most theories of thematic
roles assume that there is only a small finite number of them, no consensus has
been reached on the number or nature of the roles. Proposals range from just a few
to hundreds of them. The most common semantic roles include: