Description
Scitus Academics LLC Advances in Research on Semantic Roles by Christopher Lowell
Semantic role is the actual role a participant plays in some real or imagined
situation, apart from the linguistic encoding of those situations. Semantic
roles, also known as thematic roles, are one of the oldest classes of
constructs in linguistic theory. Semantic roles are used to indicate the role
played by each entity in a sentence and are ranging from very specific to
very general. Also, semantic roles are useful in natural language processing.
They have proved attractive because they provide a way of representing
commonalities across different uses of the same predicate or across uses of
distinct but semantically related predicates that may be obscured because
arguments with certain semantic roles may have various syntactic realizations.
Thus they provide a level of abstraction for the statement of generalizations
concerning a variety of linguistic phenomena. In particular, argument
realization generalizations are often stated over a thematic hierarchy, a
ranking of semantic roles. However, semantic roles have not lived up to their
initial promise. It has proved impossible to find a small set of roles that can
be applied across all verbs in a language, let alone across languages.
Advances in Research on Semantic Roles provide more sustained discussion
of the notion of semantic role. It often traces the development of the notion,
as well as its place within current linguistic theory. In addition, it introduces
several approaches to semantic role inventories, highlighting the similarities
and differences among them, and discusses the limitations both of
particular approaches and of semantic role approaches in general. Semantic
roles continue to be useful in stating linguistic generalizations, and so
descriptive, if not theoretical, uses of semantic role labels persist across
subfields, including language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics.