Practical Grammar 7.0

Thematic Roles

So far, we have completely ignored semantics. But xlfg is capable of representing the assignment of thematic roles to the arguments of predicates. The textbook contains a list of thematic roles on page 13. Using these roles, the next exercise asks you to assign an argument structure to each predicate that governs grammatical functions. The notation is extremely simple: just put a period and a role name after each GF name, as follows:

[PRED 'pred<GF.Role>']

Here are some concrete examples:

• [PRED 'pred<SUBJ.AGENT>']
• [PRED 'pred<SUBJ.AGENT, OBJ.PATIENT>']
• [PRED 'pred<SUBJ.AGENT, OBJ.PATIENT, OBL.LOCATION>']
• [PRED 'pred<SUBJ.THEME>']

Exercise 7.3

1. Go to https://147.210.117.56 and log in.
2. Open your latest version of Grammar 6 - 2025-07-16
3. Click on "Output Parameters"
4. Under "Output for Argument-Structure:" select "Draw the Argument-Structure as an acyclic graph"
5. Return to "Input"
6. Assign the thematic role THEME to the SUBJ of the verb disappeared.
7. Parse and look at the output for the sentence John disappeared.
8. Study the relationship between the f-structure and the Argument Structure in the output.
9. Now assign thematic roles to all the other governed grammatical functions in your lexicon and make sure you get the expected Argument Structure output.

Homework

Read section 5.1 of the textbook.

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