Лекции по теоретической грамматике английского языка для студентов

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 

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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: