4
votes
Accepted
What is the Theta Role of "It" in "It seemed that ..."
To my understanding, it has none.
Theta-roles are semantic concepts. But this "it" doesn't exist on the semantic level: it only appears because syntactically, English doesn't allow a verb without a ...
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2
votes
a term for the type of ambi-transitive verb that can do away with an object
Transitivity is a hard concept to handle. Verbs like eat or drink seem like prototypic transitive verbs, but they occur in a lot of structures
He ate.
He ate too much.
He ate for a long time.
He ate ...
- 10.1k
2
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a term for the type of ambi-transitive verb that can do away with an object
These can be called agentive ambitransitive verbs.
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Theta Criterion Violation
Let's start with standard GB theta theory. In your sentence "I saw the tall kid", "the tall kid" is an NP,1 with "kid" as the head. There is an AP here, as you suggest, but it consists of nothing but ...
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vote
How do we characterize the thematic relations between verbs and subordinate phrases (clauses?) in languages without explicit case marking (eg English)
"Case" refers specifically to morphological systems, so it would be very confusing to use that term for languages which don't have such a system.
Thematic relations/roles are the semantic ...
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