The early papers collected here trace a trajectory through the work and thinking of Charles Fillmore over his long and distinguished career--reflecting his desire to make sense of the workings of language in a way that keeps in mind questions of language form, language use, and the conventions linking form, meaning, and practice.
Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, language: English, abstract: The aim of this work on semantic roles is supposed to reveal that the English language needs another approach to describe the relations between entities, which are the predicate and the specific argument in sentences. This work is opened by an introduction, which is followed by a research report. In the report, a concise overview about the history of semantic roles and the development of this field of research is illustrated. Starting in the sixties of the last century, the most significant names, like Fillmore and Gruber, and their contributions are mentioned to depict the survey. Furthermore, the work is composed of a twofold perspective on case systems. The first one considers the German case system with some of its characteristics that are relevant for this topic. The other one is supposed to delineate features and properties of the English cases, which can be transferred to this issue on semantic roles. This approach allows a more detailed and structured view and therefore supports the understanding of how the English language is in need of a different description for its sentence inherent structures and relations. The author ends with a conclusion. The issue of semantic roles is a very significant one with regard to the English language. It has been established in the sixties of the nineteenth century as a counter approach to the predominant subject of syntax. As the case system in English has decreased over time, semantic roles are able to express relations within the sentence, which grammar cannot grasp.
In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in grammatical constructionsunits of grammar representing formmeaning correspondences. The movement in which Construction Grammar, as developed by Charles Fillmore and Paul Kay, has played a significant role, has arisen in part as aresponse to the Chomskyan modular approach, which treats grammatical constructions as epiphenomenal, dismantling their component features and attributing these to general principles of grammar. This volume is the first collection to focus on grammatical constructions per se, and is dedicated to Charles Fillmore in recognition of his leadership in the field. The papers all reflect or elaborate on his work, which shows how lexicon, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics interact in givingconstructions their individual holistic characters as basic units of grammar. Several approaches to constructions are represented here, dealing with topics that range from idiomatized constructions to traditional forms such as conditionals, relative clauses, and benefactive constructions. A unifying thread is the shared conviction that close examination of the nature ofgrammatical constructions, with particular emphasis on their idiosyncrasies and on the complex interrelationships among their forms, functions, meanings, and uses in ordinary speech and writing, provides a rich foundation upon which to build a theory of cognition, memory, and grammar.
The concept of semantic roles has been central to linguistic theory for many decades. More specifically, the assumption of such representations as mediators in the correspondence between a linguistic form and its associated meaning has helped to address a number of critical issues related to grammatical phenomena. Furthermore, in addition to featuring in all major theories of grammar, semantic (or 'thematic') roles have been referred to extensively within a wide range of other linguistic subdisciplines, including language typology and psycho-/neurolinguistics. This volume brings together insights from these different perspectives and thereby, for the first time, seeks to build upon the obvious potential for cross-fertilisation between hitherto autonomous approaches to a common theme. To this end, a view on semantic roles is adopted that goes beyond the mere assumption of generalised roles, but also focuses on their hierarchical organisation. The book is thus centred around the interdisciplinary examination of how these hierarchical dependencies subserve argument linking - both in terms of linguistic theory and with respect to real-time language processing - and how they interact with other information types in this process. Furthermore, the contributions examine the interaction between the role hierarchy and the conceptual content of (generalised) semantic roles and investigate their cross-linguistic applicability and psychological reality, as well as their explanatory potential in accounting for phenomena in the domain of language disorders. In bridging the gap between different disciplines, the book provides a valuable overview of current thought on semantic roles and argument linking, and may further serve as a point of departure for future interdisciplinary research in this area. As such, it will be of interest to scientists and advanced students in all domains of linguistics and cognitive science.
Especially in functional-typological linguistics, semantic roles have been studied thoroughly, because they constitute a good starting point for any study on argument marking due to their semantically defined nature. However, the very concept of semantic roles is far from being without problems, and there is still no consensus on how the roles are best defined. In this volume, the notion will be discussed from novel perspectives with the aim of providing new insights into our understanding of semantic roles. Two of the papers deal with semantic role clusters, one with semantic roles in verbless constructions, one with diachrony of semantic roles and two with individual semantic roles that have not been studied in too much detail in previous studies. The book may not offer answers to all questions the readers may have, but at least it raises interesting further questions relevant to arriving at a better understanding of semantic roles. Originally published in Studies in Language Vol. 38:3 (2014).
This book is aimed at providing an overview of several aspects of semantic role labeling. Chapter 1 begins with linguistic background on the definition of semantic roles and the controversies surrounding them. Chapter 2 describes how the theories have led to structured lexicons such as FrameNet, VerbNet and the PropBank Frame Files that in turn provide the basis for large scale semantic annotation of corpora. This data has facilitated the development of automatic semantic role labeling systems based on supervised machine learning techniques. Chapter 3 presents the general principles of applying both supervised and unsupervised machine learning to this task, with a description of the standard stages and feature choices, as well as giving details of several specific systems. Recent advances include the use of joint inference to take advantage of context sensitivities, and attempts to improve performance by closer integration of the syntactic parsing task with semantic role labeling. Chapter 3 also discusses the impact the granularity of the semantic roles has on system performance. Having outlined the basic approach with respect to English, Chapter 4 goes on to discuss applying the same techniques to other languages, using Chinese as the primary example. Although substantial training data is available for Chinese, this is not the case for many other languages, and techniques for projecting English role labels onto parallel corpora are also presented. Table of Contents: Preface / Semantic Roles / Available Lexical Resources / Machine Learning for Semantic Role Labeling / A Cross-Lingual Perspective / Summary
This volume is a comprehensive, up-to-date, and readable introduction to linguistic meaning. While partial to conceptual and typological approaches, the book also presents results from formal approaches. Throughout, the focus is on grammatical meaning -- the way languages delineate universal semantic space and encode it in grammatical form. Subjects covered by the author include: the domain of linguistic semantics and the basic tools, assumptions, and issues of semantic analysis; semantic properties of entities, events, and thematic roles; language and space; tense, aspect, and the internal structure and temporal ordering of events; modality, negation, and the epistemology of the speaker; and modification and attribution. In contrast to most current treatments of semantics, this book is accessible to the beginning student of semantics and linguistics and also useful to the advanced practitioner. A textbook and reference work in a single volume, it can be used in a number of disciplines: psychology, computer science, and anthropology as well as linguistics.
