This paper tests two claims about the thematic roles Agent and Patient: first, that they can be
decomposed into more primitive features, as laid out in Dowty's (1991) Proto-Roles …

Thematic roles are typically viewed as slot and filler m echanisms in which the slots are
devoid of content, or the content is limited to a few syntactically relevant features. This …

Linguistic and psycholinguistic theories differ with regard to the conceptual content of verbs'
thematic roles. In Experiments 1 and 2, single-word priming was used to demonstrate that …

Verbs that are similar in meaning tend to occur in the same syntactic structures. For
example, give and hand, which denote transfer of possession, both appear in the …

Two experiments investigated the focusing properties of thematic roles, while a third
experiment investigated the view that thematic role preferences reflect a focusing on the …

Humans use language to describe actions by mapping the thematic roles of agent (doer of
actions) and patient (recipient of actions) on the grammatical categories of subject and …

Two experiments are described in which participants read sentences of the form “He drank
some…” in contexts which either did or did not introduce something drinkable. Participants …

The present paper deals with several still unsolved or highly controversial issues in role
semantics. One of them is the mismatches in the semanticrole hierarchies found in the …

The general theme of this paper is the need to distinguish categories such as Agent, Patient
and Dative from categories such as Subject and Object, Direct and Indirect. These two sets …

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 …