This section is about linguistic meaning, particularly semantics: how the meaning of words combine to form the meaning of sentences.

2.6.1 Linguistic meaning and semantics

We use the word “meaning” in various ways in our everyday lives. Linguistic meaning refers to the sorts of things we have to know as language users when we produce and comprehend meaning. Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning: how the meaning of words combine to form the meaning of sentences. In this chapter, we will analyse linguistic meaning from various perspectives. There are many different kinds of linguistic meaning. Each way of thinking about meaning gives us important insight into how we produce and understand meaning as language users.

Consider the following sentence.

This is likely a sentence you have never heard before in your life, but you are still able to comprehend it and understand what it means. The reason for this is because you have the meaning of each morpheme that appears in this sentence stored in your head, and by combining those meanings, you are able to get the meaning of the overall sentence. This is the principle of compositionality: the meaning of a complex linguistic unit results from the individual meanings of its subparts, and how these subparts were combined. This means that the meaning of a sentence is determined by the meaning of the words that it contains, and how these words were put together. It also means that the meaning of a multi-morphemic word is determined by the meaning of the morphemes it contains, and how they were put together. So for example, the meaning of the word unhelpfulness is the combination of the meaning of un-, help, -ful, and -ness, put together as [ [ un- [ help -ful ] ] -ness ]. Compositionality is not just a matter of what linguistic pieces you put together: it also matters how you put the pieces together, too. 

2.6.2 Arguments and thematic roles

In previous sections, we classified predicates (verbs and verb phrases) in terms of their transitivity—that is, the number of arguments they combine with. Intransitive verbs take only a subject, while transitive verbs take both a subject and an object, and ditransitive verbs take a subject, an object, and an indirect object.

Importantly, “subject” and “object” are structural terms, not semantic ones. In English, a subject appears at the beginning of a declarative clause, has nominative case (if it’s a pronoun), and controls agreement on the tensed verb. An object in English occurs after the verb, and has accusative case (if it’s a pronoun).

As we are now exploring the area of semantics (the study of meaning), verbs can be thought of as describing events or states. The difference between events and situations, in semantics, is that events are often thought of as dynamic (things are actively happening), whereas states are static (things that are simply true, without anything happening, like being tall).  Both events and states involve some number of participants. The participants can play various roles, which we will call thematic roles.

Do subjects always play the same role in an event or state? If we look at the following examples, it looks like they don’t:

Indeed, we sometimes see this even with a single verb, as with sink in (2).

In the sentences in (2), we see that the verb sink can be either transitive or intransitive. In (2a) [the pirate] is the subject and in (2b) [the ship] is the subject, but they play different roles in the event or state. Indeed, in (2a) [the ship] is the object, but plays the same role in the event as it does when it’s the subject in (2b).

But for other verbs, we don’t see this kind of “trading places”:

In (3) the subject stays the same in the transitive and intransitive uses of the verb write, and [the author] continues to play the same kind of role in the event.

To talk about the different roles associated with subjects and objects, we can define a number of thematic roles that are relevant in natural language. There are potentially many such roles, but in this section we’ll focus on just a few.

Agent

Agents are animate actors who do things on purpose.

• [The pirate] sank the ship. (subject = agent)

Causer

Causers are often inanimate (not alive); they cause things to happen but without acting on purpose.

• [The bilge pump malfunction] sank the ship. (subject = causer)

Not all animate subjects are agents: some animate subjects instead perceive something or experience a mental state.

Experiencer

An experiencer is an animate participant that experiences a mental state. This includes perceiving something, as with the subjects of verbs like see, hear, etc.

• [Pirates] frighten me. (me = experiencer, [pirates] = causer)
• I fear [pirates]. / I like [pirates]. (I = experiencer, [pirates] = causer)
• [The pirates] saw an approaching storm. ([the pirates] = experiencer)

Theme

The theme is the participant to which something happens, and may be changed by the event.

• The pirate sank [the ship]. ([the ship] = theme, affected/changed by the event)
• The author read [a book]. ([a book] = theme, not affected by the event)

Instrument

An instrument is the thing an agent uses to accomplish an action, often (but not necessarily) introduced in English by the preposition with.

• The pirate sank the ship [with a cannon]. (PP = instrument)

Location

A location is the place where an eventuality occurs, often (but not necessarily) introduced by a locative preposition.

• The pirate sank the ship [at sea]. (PP = location)

Goal

The goal is the location or person that receives the theme. In most ditransitives, the indirect object is the goal of the eventuality.

• The pirates sent [the ship] a message.
• The pirates sent a message to [the ship]. ([the ship] = goal; a message = theme)

Different verbs don’t just select how many arguments they combine with, but also select what thematic roles those arguments take. At the same time, verbs aren’t totally free to map thematic roles onto argument positions; for example, while we’ve seen that an experiencer can be either the subject or object of a verb, if a verb combines with both an agent and a theme, the agent is always the subject. Also, whenever a verb takes only a single argument, that argument will necessarily be the subject (at least in English, and in many other languages).

Chapter Attribution

This chapter has been adapted in parts from:

Essentials of Linguistics (2nd edition) by Anderson et al. (2022). Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.