Talk:Thematic relation

New article

Please see the talk article on Theta role for discussion of the split of this article from that one. AndrewCarnie 13:27, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

This article is largely the article that was (incorrectly) under theta roles. I've fixed the definitions in the theta role entry and moved thematic relations here. Although I've edited this quite a bit, it still needs a lot of work. Please fix! AndrewCarnie 13:27, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Excuse me but why is "Mary" in Bill gave Mary a present a THEME? I don't recall anyone claiming that. Moreover, the theme is used in two senses (right, you mentioned it in the article): theme₁ as patient and theme₂ as a displaced entity. So, we should correct the definition of the theme (it's simply wrong in the article). Russky1802 06:18, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

You are absolutely right -- Mary is a goal in that sentence in the old Thematic Role/Theta Role article that got moved over, I just missed it in moving the entry over. I've put in a better example. As for the patient/theme definitions, honestly I don't believe there is a distinction, but others do, so those who feel strongly can check the definitions. AndrewCarnie 20:00, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

The difference between theme₁ as patient and theme₂ as a displaced entity lies on whether something such as 'a door' gets an intrinsic attribute such as being 'open' or 'closed' or whether something such as 'a book' gets a circumstantial attribute such as being 'on a table', 'on the shelves', 'on the floor' and so on. This differentiation is quite relevant for works in robotics for two reasons: 1. the way in which we perceive intrinsic and extrinsic attributes is different and circumstancial attributes are a particular kind of extrinsic attribute; 2. the attributes that get represented as circumstances in a language are exactly the ones that have the largest potential variation: the possibility of combining adpositions and nominal groups is very useful for that purpose and people start using metaphors and switching from representing patients to representing displaced entities whenever the number of potential attributes increases too much (this is what we see in specialized language detached from perception: "iPhones come in five colors" instead of "some iPhones are pink, some are gold, some are silver..."). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.79.92.56 (talk) 08:14, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Clean-up

This article needs a bit of a clean-up, as it now reads as a bunch of randomly thrown-in facts about thematic relations, written in different styles (and sometimes no style at all). I could give examples, but then again, I could cite almost the entire article. Also, the example given for encoding thematic relations grammatically mentions Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish, but the example given from Finnish is one that (almost) all Slavic languages have as well (i.e. an instrumental case), e.g. Polish "jadę samochodem" "I go by car". I did not yet add a clean-up tag, but someone really should take it up (not me, I have too little knowledge on the subject, unfortunately). Jalwikip (talk) 20:00, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Suggestion

I am not an expert on grammar (much less in english, so please point out my grammar mistakes) but I understand that the main goal of this sort of categorization is helping in the detection of the main features in a text and the relations entiled to its constituens. Here is where my doubt arises and where my suggestion points to, since the "patient" is said to undergo the action but changing its state, what about the phrase "Jhon gave a rose to Sarah"; is "a rose" theme or patient?, what state are we talking about here (perhaps rose's place?), please notice that there is no mean to discover the underlined context such that we can say that Jhon translated the rose from its place or not (He might have left the rose to Sarah along with a room as he is leaving, for instance). Also I would not talk about "ownership" as a state since is a transcient phenomena. Would not be much more convenient to talk about the underlined frame and about the state as not being a fixed frame but something derived from context and may give the right sense to the phrase?. The spanish version of this wiki describes "patient" as a participant of a verbal predicate of type process that suffers physical changes along the process e.g "The falling rocks crashed the car" so it sounds to me like there is not consensus about what "state" is (here appear to be physical state). I know I can be all wrong but I hope my statement is clear enought. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Poissonbreaker (talk • contribs) 20:58, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Source

There are different lists of thematic relations depending on the author. Maybe it would be helpful if the article named the source of this list clearly, in addition to the list of authors at the end. A good addition would be a comparison of the lists published by various authors. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.90.216.70 (talk) 15:07, 12 January 2013 (UTC)