Thematic Roles and the Individuation of Events

Abstract

The history of thematic roles (alternatively called ‘case roles/relations’ (Fillmore, 1968) and ‘thematic relations’ (Gruber, 1965)) in recent linguistic theory is one filled with varying conceptions of what these are, if indeed they exist at all.¹ They have at times been conceived of as purely syntactic objects (e.g. the ‘theta roles’ of Chomsky, 1981; the “case relations” of Fillmore, 1968), as names for parts of lexical/conceptual structure (e.g. Jackendoff, 1987), as purely semantic objects (Dowty, 1991; Parsons 1990, Carlson, 1984), or as epiphenomena (Ravin, 1990). The question of whether thematic roles are objects made reference to by a linguistic theory has been examined and reexamined with mixed results (Jackendoff (1972, 1987), Nishigauchi (1984), Dryer (1985), Bresnan (1982), Ladusaw and Dowty (1988), Ravin (1990)). This is perhaps not surprising since thematic roles would appear to be dispensable entities in the sense that it is easy to conceive of how to write a lexicon, a syntax, a morphology, a semantics, or a pragmatics without them. Still, the observations surrounding thematic roles are just tantalizing enough to take notice, and make one wonder what they might be.