Thematic proto-roles and argument selection

By David R. Dowty. 1991

As a novel attack on the perennially vexing questions of the theoretical status of thematic roles and the inventory of possible roles, this paper defends a strategy of basing accounts of roles on more unified domains of linguistic data than have been used in the past to motivate roles, addressing in particular the problem of ARGUMENT SELECTION (principles determining which roles are associated with which grammatical relations). It is concluded that the best theory for describing this domain is not a traditional system of discrete roles (Agent, Patient, Source, etc.) but a theory in which the only roles are two cluster-concepts called PROTO-AGENT and PROTO-PATIENT, each characterized by a set of verbal entailments: an argument of a verb may bear either of the two proto-roles (or both) to varying degrees, according to the number of entailments of each kind the verb gives it. Both fine-grained and coarse-grained classes of verbal arguments (corresponding to traditional thematic roles and other classes as well) follow automatically, as do desired 'role hierarchies'. By examining occurrences of the 'same' verb with different argument configurations—e.g. two forms of psych predicates and object-oblique alternations as in the familiar spray/load class—it can also be argued that proto-roles act as defaults in the learning of lexical meanings. Are proto-role categories manifested elsewhere in language or as cognitive categories? If so, they might be a means of making grammar acquisition easier for the child, they might explain certain other typological and acquisitional observations, and they may lead to an account of contrasts between unaccusative and unergative intransitive verbs that does not rely on deriving unaccusatives from underlying direct objects.

Subfields: Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics & Semantics

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Natural Language Processing

In Computational Linguistics & Semantics

Citations in the corpus

Hypothesis Only Baselines in Natural Language Inference (2018, background): “Semantic Proto-Roles (SPR) Inspired by Dowty (1991)’s thematic role theory, Reisinger et al.”
Verb Semantics and Lexical Selection (1994, background): “3 Fine-tuned syntactic-semantic correspondence Recent research (Levin, 1992) (Dowty, 1991) also shows that the verb syntactic behavior is sensitive to a more ne-tuned set of semantic components than the thematic role distinctions.”
The Proposition Bank: An Annotated Corpus of Semantic Roles (2005, neutral): “For a particular verb, Arg0 is generally the argument exhibiting features of a Pro-totypical Agent (Dowty 1991), while Arg1 is a Prototypical Patient or Theme.”
Verb Physics: Relative Physical Knowledge of Actions and Objects (2017, methodology): “In addition, our work is motivated by the formal semantics of Dowty (1991), as the task of learning verb implications is essentially that of extracting lexical entailments for verbs.”
Grammatical Relations Typology (2010, background): “…follow here, is that for the purpose of GR specifications, such individual, predicate-specific roles merge systematically into generalized roles, sometimes called macroroles (Foley and Van Valin 1984; Van Valin and LaPolla 1997; Van Valin 2005) or protoroles (Dowty 1991; Primus 1999, this volume).”
On the Evaluation of Semantic Phenomena in Neural Machine Translation Using Natural Language Inference (2018, methodology): “Proto-roles Dowty (1991)’s proto-roles may be expressed differently in different languages, and so correctly identifying them can be important for translation.”
Type shifting in construction grammar: An integrated approach to aspectual coercion* (2004, background): “In (84a), the ac- complishment verb recite is interpreted in a manner consistent with its Aktionsart: it denotes the execution of a pattern, and the NP the mass is an incremental theme in the sense of Dowty (1991).”