 Today, I want to talk about a particular thing which is called thematic relations in sentence, thematic relations among arguments in a sentence and what you have seen so far is as the structure of a sentence or the structure of any phrase is X bar is scheme is actually a representation of sentence and what we are going to discuss in terms of thematic relations is actually constrained on, constrained on components and their relationships. So, that we do not, we do not get anything that we want in sentence and elements in a sentence gets restricted in a particular way. However, that does not stop the, that does not disrupt the things that we have talked about a phrase or a sentence can be infinitely long, still be infinitely long as long as the thematic relations is taken care of. Before getting into specific thematic relations what sentences like to follow besides categorical rules, lexical rules and semantic selection rules is selectional restrictions. We do not, we do not find sentences which have, which violate selectional restriction that is a predicate in a sentence is very, very sensitive to what it selects and sometimes violation of such selectional restriction may lead to unacceptable and grammaticality. As you can see here it is there, the grammatically these sentences are very, very clear, very good. There is, there is no grammatical error in the sentences like these like my dog, my dogs love to read. There is an error here in the sentence my dogs love to read newspapers. Perfectly good sentence read is a transitive verb. It has an argument, it has a compliment, sorry love is a transitive verb. It has a compliment and it works perfectly fine, but this is not a warranted sentence in natural language. This chair is sweet. The problem, this sentence runs into difficulty when it selects the, the noun selects not warranted adjective in it. Buildings walk slowly. Say it is a, this sentence again violates selectional restriction where the predicate walk does not select, does not agree with specifier of a noun, specifier of a sentence where the agreement does not work between them. I briefly want to underline one issue and then move to thematic relations and to this issue I will come, come later when I am talking about structural relations. See the, the relationship between love and newspaper is perfectly okay. Love to read newspaper is perfectly okay. The problem is between the predicate love and the subject. Do you notice that? Similarly in the third one the problem is between the predicate and the subject okay. There is, there is no problem within the predicate where walks and the adverbs slowly is perfectly done. I will return to this thing later. I just wanted to underline this thing to you. Thematic relations in a sentence is about roles that, that an argument plays in a sentence. For example, when we say Brad hit Andrew, this is a good sentence. How many nouns phrases do you see here? How many nouns do you see here in the sentence? Two, one is the, according to the structure of a sentence, one is the subject and the other is, the other noun is object. One is subject, the other is an object. Thematically speaking, subject and objects both have a role to play in a sentence. Thematically speaking, in this sentence Brad plays the role of an agent and Andrew plays some other role okay. And the definition of an agent, you can read this thing, the definition of an agent is someone who initiates the action okay. Normally in a sentence, in a declarative sentence you are going to see subjects responsible for initiating actions. Therefore most of the time subject gets the role of an agent. However, that may not be a necessary condition for the sentence everywhere. So, we cannot say by definition subjects are agents. That may not be true, but most of the time subject nouns, subject n p's get thematic role of an agent okay. I come to, and yes there is another important point here that every noun phrase that you see in a sentence, every noun phrase must have a thematic role. If a noun in a sentence does not have a thematic role then that leads to ungrammaticality too. That which means that sentence, that noun is not needed in the sentence, therefore the sentence is grammatical. I am going to show you some examples of how not getting a thematic role leads a sentence into ungrammaticality. Could we say that the subject of all active word sentences could be agents? Not necessarily, not necessarily. We can say like the example that I gave you this, the building walks slowly. It is a grammatical sentence. It is a declarative sentence, not a passive one. Building could get a semantic, thematic role of an agent, but this is not a grammatical sentence for two reasons. There is a mismatch between building and walking because the, when, when walk assigns agent-theta-thematic role to a noun, it must be a movable object. In that case also, if suppose, and there are some predicates which just does not assign thematic role, agent role to its subject. I am going to show you some examples of such type. However, statistically this is true that most of the time sentences tend to get agent-theta role, but we cannot form that as a rule. Again to repeat this thing, please keep in mind that every noun phrase, every noun must have a theta role, a thematic role in a sentence. Next one, next is experiencer. And look at, look at these examples. Sometimes certain predicates, when they assign thematic role to their, to their noun phrases in the, in the sentence, they need not be agents in the sense that Bob saw the, saw the car. The predicates seen does not require agency. When, when you are seeing something, you are not necessarily an agent. So, subject noun phrase getting thematic role of an agent depends on the nature of the predicate. Whether a predicate wants an agent-thematic role or not, syntax frightens gym. Now, the word frighten is not something which assigns agent-theta role, agent-thematic role to NNP. And the, the, the reason why this example is significant here is because experience, experiencer-thematic role is not necessarily assigned to the subject alone. It can be assigned to objects as well. So, in this sentence, you see gym being the experiencer of the whole act of being, getting frighten. Susan loves cookies. Does the word love assigns agency? Agent-theatrol is Susan an agent in this sentence. It does not look like an active agent. It becomes an experiencer. The, the point in this is predicates like see, frighten, love, hit. These do not assign necessarily an agency to the subject and sometimes these predicates assign experiencer-thematic role to arguments. These predicates assign experiencer-thematic role to arguments and sometimes they assign experiencer-thematic role to their objects as well. In the, like frighten's assent, an agency role to the subject, right? Syntax frightens gym. Will be similar, similar to that? Right. Gym and Andrew will be experiencer. Yes. That will assign. Also, like the, object can be an agent also, right? No. Object will not be an agent. In a passive or sentencer? Passive sentences are different type of sentences. Remember yesterday, I was telling you about transformation rules. In earlier theoretical models of explaining sentences, we were working with transformation rules. So, according to transformation rules, interrogative sentences were transformed from declarative sentences. Passive sentences were transformed from active sentences. That is, we had active to passive transformation, declarative to question transformation, affirmative to negative transformation. These research has shown that these sentences are independent sentences. They are not, actually, when you have a passive sentence, they are not actually related to active one. When we have a interrogative sentence, they are not necessarily related to the declarative, declarative sentences and likewise, negative sentences are not really a product of their affirmative counterparts. So, every time we talk about a passive sentence, what comes to our mind is its active counterpart. That is not true. What is also true about thematic relations is, once a thematic relation is assigned to a noun in a sentence, it does not change. It stays the same way. So, in talking about a passive sentence, if the subject has, let us say, let us talk about an older model, in which passive sentences were outcomes of active counterparts. In an active sentence, the subject was assigned agent-theta row. In the passive, also, it remains agent. So, when we say John killed the tiger, the passive counterpart will be a tiger was killed by John. Who is the agent? The subject of the passive sentence becomes the tiger, but the tiger does not receive agent-theta row, agent-thematic relation. What still remains agent is by John. So, thematic relations do not change once assigned to a particular NP. Still, there are components which shows the X bar and case agreement and other structural relations which show that passive sentences are not the direct outcome of their active counterparts. If time permits, I will show you that part. But is this much clear? Let us look at another one. Sometimes. So, when you look at sentences like, Mary loves cookies. We have just seen Mary will get the thematic role of an experiencer, but what is the role of cookies in this sentence? Is it an agent? Is it an experiencer? Does it experience anything? Does this NP experience anything? When some NPs remain basically dormant, then they are called themes. So, these types of NPs with these predicates get thematic role of theme. The syntactician bought a phonology textbook or we can get any sentence with the predicate buy. I bought a car. When I am buying a car, the compliment car is neither an agent nor an experiencer. It nothing happens to that. It remains dormant in the argument structure and therefore, we call it a theme. Please know that these words like agent, patient, experiencer, theme, these are the words coined depending on their roles. So, there is nothing technical about these names. What is technical is which one gets assigned to which NP? Rock, hit, terry. Why is it terry and experiencer? They are semantically dependent roles. True, but the thematic role theme is more appropriate for that because it did not want to be hit. In the thematic role of experiencer, sometimes volitionality may be involved, but there is no volitionality involved. There was no fault of terry when it got hit by, it is a very terrible sentence. I do not know why this kind of sentence comes to existence, but anyway. You are right, it could be experiencer as well. It will be very difficult to argue this is not an experiencer at all because terry does not experience anything, but what I can say is theme will be more appropriate and better than theme, what will be more even more appropriate is patient in the sense that it did not have any role in getting hit. At times in calling this one either an experiencer or a theme could be little bit complicated. What could be more complicated is the distinction between theme and patient. Some people make the distinction between theme and patient too. I have tried to put at least two of them together. You are right that this could be, it is easy to argue that this could be something else also and there is not much to defend there. What is an important part of this is what you think is that NP can be debated, but that NP must have a thematic role is not debated. Look at another one goal. Now, look at this one and you will see more difficulty. A falling rock hit terry. Did we have the same sentence there? Now, look at this. It could be a goal too. So, we are not saying that an object NP will have just one name for it. Depending upon the meaning of the sentence, it could be an experiencer, it could be a theme, it could be a goal. Sometimes this ambiguity may not lie. There is an error here. This is an error. This one is not, that sentence is not good, but look at the third one. Bill went to Chicago. To Chicago as a, as a phrase is a goal. Travis was given a semantics article. This is a passive sentence and in this this NP becomes a goal. Because it says goals may involve abstract motion. So, the buying could be the abstract motion. He is the recipient of the. But not the goal. It will not be a goal. This is an error here for sure. This is an error. That rule we cannot formulate. We are only with this roles, we are only saying that there are different types of roles. Agent, theme, patient, goal, experiencer. These are different names of different relations. How the theme and the goal be, be different? A falling rock, a falling rock. In the same sentence, our teddy is the goal as well as the theme. As well as the patient or the, or theme. It could be, it could be a theme that it, it did not have anything to do. Theme, theme is more, more or less a dormant kind of an entity. Like I read a book. A book is a theme in this sentence. In this case it is not, each one of these arguments, each one of these NP's in a sentence must have one or the other role. There could be more roles assigned to one, but one must be assigned. And these are the differences of names. Sometimes these names are, these names may sound overlapping and also please look at the definitions that I have given. They are not a standard or text book definitions. They are just a generic description of these terms. I do not think there is, there are text book definitions of these things anyway. Should we talk about a recipient? Not yet. Let us see what becomes a recipient. Jessica gave, sorry, Julie gave Jessica the book. Is this a clear example of a recipient? Someone which receives special kind of goal that involves change of position. Does this NP's sound like a recipient? It is a clear example of a recipient. Now it sounds the same as the, like, how is it different from the goal? I did not understand that part. Difference from the goal. In goal we took the example of Travis was given a semantic article. The recipient also, sir. Travis, yeah, that is possible. So, and what is it? Experiencer and recipient. I, the way I understand it is an experiencer has to be plus human entity and the recipient may or may not be. And again, I am trying to tell you this thing again and again that these names may overlap. So, the more significant question is, how do I decide whether this is an experiencer or a recipient or a goal or a theme? X bar theory does not help us to that. Rather, what thematic relations of arguments does is, puts a check on X bar theory that if we have warranted a phrase in the sentence with a thematic relation, then please take care of this. You find a place for this in the, in the structure. If we do not have a role assigned to a, to an NP or a PP, then that is not part of the sentence. Just, just drop that. That, that is out of the main component of the sentence. How we give them a name is, is more of, more often, most often, most often decided by us, in this case this sounds more like a goal, not like a recipient. This sounds more like a patient, not like a theme or more like a theme, not like patient. It, decided by us. We can impose more and more restrictions on the differences between recipient and, and what was that? Experiencer or theme and patient or goal. Some of them are very close, some of them are way too different from one another. But there is no yard stick to categorically say that no, this is, this is a goal, this is an experiencer, this is, this is a patient. There is no such thing. Like, like I tried to show you the distinction between a compliment and adjunct, there are categorical rules for that. A compliment can only be a compliment before in the structural hierarchy. An agent need, sorry, an adjunct can be defined structurally. These things do not have a structural distinction. These things cannot be classified in structural terms. Therefore, you find this overlap and, and what we call ambiguity. Get it? There are, there are more and we can, we can point more names like location, instrument depending upon what suits that P P or N P. Andrew is in the room. In the room is a location, locational P P. We are all at school. At school gets locational thematic, locational thematic, thematic role. When we say things like, Patrick hacked the computer apart with an axe. You really hack a computer with an axe? That is okay. This guy will, this key will open the door to the Douglas building or to the ICNSR building. The N P key and the P P with an axe get instrumental role in these predicates. And then, then we have more like, benefactor, the entity for whom the action occurs. Sentences like bill bought these flowers for Mary. Mary will be a benefactor, will, will, will get benefit of these things. Now, again look at this. This could also be recipient. This could also be recipient. So, these are, these are just the names that, that we can assign. And if you assign recipient thematic role, the recipient role to this, it is not really too, too bad. There are more. I, I have just mentioned some of them to you. Let us look at thematic criterion, which, which plays as, which works as condition, as restriction on sentences structure. Every argument must have one and only one theta role. Again, look at this. Let me move and then I will show you what it means by one and only one. And every theta role must be assigned to one and only one argument, which means if we have already decided about an agent, we cannot assign another agent, we cannot decide about another agent in the sentence. That is, there cannot be two agents in one sentence. Get, get this thing? So, this, this puts a very heavy restriction on assignment of thematic roles. Sentences, in compound sentences also, every NP will get a thematic role. For example, give me an example of a compound sentence. I have just discussed one with you, so far. John knows that Bill likes Mary. The whole sentence that Bill likes Mary gets one theta role, which is assigned by the predicate no. And then again in that sentence, when you look at the predicate like, it assigns two different theta roles to two different internal NP's, Bill and Mary. That is how a complex sentence will work. Adjuncts are optional, whereas complements and subjects are obligatory to a predicate. Do we understand this part? Can I take it for given? Subjects and complements are obligatory to a predicate, whereas the adjuncts are not. Look at the examples, when we say John put the book on the table on Friday. If we have a sentence, John put the book on the table. This is a good sentence, but if we say John put the book on Friday is not a good sentence. We understand this thing? This simply explains us how a compliment is an essential and obligatory part of a predicate, whereas adjuncts are not. The reason for us to discuss this is adjuncts are not included in the theta grid that I am going to show you. Now we can define theta roles. Theta roles are a bundle of thematic relations associated with a particular argument, where thematic relation is not what we mean by theta role. There is a difference between thematic relation and theta role. An argument can have many thematic relations, but can have only one theta role. This becomes clearer when we look at how it works. Look at this. We have a sentence, John gave flowers to Mary. In this we have three, we find three components which need to receive theta roles and we need to look at their thematic relations. One is John, the other is the flower and the last one is Mary. These are the thematic relations among them, among the different arguments. For example, John can be in relations to flower a source or an agent. Mary can be a recipient of according to this predicate. Mary can also be goal according to this predicate. However, when we look at thematic roles, it has just one. In relation to the other other arguments, we may find different names, but at once John gets one thematic role of an agent or a source. Flower gets one thematic role of theme and Mary gets one thematic role of recipient or goal with relation to the predicate. Looking at thematic roles, theta grid, if we look at the predicate like love, it must have two of them, experiencer and a theme. When both the arguments are met, both the arguments are present around the predicate, then we get the sentence as a good sentence. As you can see, the index explains this thing. When an argument is missing from the thematic grid, then the sentence is ungrammatical, which is the reason why this sentence John loves is not a good sentence is because it has theme missing from it. If we have more arguments available in a sentence which is not part of the thematic grid, that also results into ungrammaticality. For example, this predicate love requires only two arguments, have only two thematic roles, but if there is third one for which this predicate does not have a thematic role to assign, then this is a bad sentence. We say John loves Mary, Megan is a bad sentence because third one, Megan does not get a thematic role assigned in this. Relationship between syntactic structure, that is subject and complement and relationship between semantic roles is the following. When we talk about arguments of a predicate, how many arguments does this predicate have? Love, what is the total number of, is this a transitive verb or intransitive verb? Transitive one. How many arguments does it need? It should be clear. So, by now, how many arguments does this need? Don't look at thematic roles. Think about argument structure of a predicate that we have been discussing until yesterday. How many compliments do we have in intransitive verbs? For intransitive, can you please go back and look at your notes? The intransitive verbs have no argument, like no n p. Intranjitive verbs have no compliments, which means they have no argument. Transitive verbs have one and rightranjitive verbs have two. The implications of this is when we count the argument of a sentence or argument of a predicate, we do not count subjects in it. Now, the reason why I am talking about argument structure of a transitive verb, that is it requires one, with that I also want you to know that when we count these arguments within the predicate, we do not count subjects, because subject is a given thing with every sentence. We do not count subjects. When we are looking at thematic relations, then subjects are counted in thematic relations as well. So, assignment of thematic roles to subject is different from the predicate structure. When we look at thematic grid, inside thematic grid we have subjects included. Inside the argument structure, subjects are not included. Is this part making sense? Subjects are not part of the argument structure when we count the total number of arguments of a predicate, whereas when we are counting thematic roles assigned by a predicate, subjects are included in that. Is this making sense? So, how do we count it? What we mean by this question is when we are counting, we are only counting compliments. We are not counting subjects, because subject is outside the predicate. Therefore, in the predicate structure, subjects are not counted. Is this clear at least now? Why subject is not part of the compliment, part of the predicate structure is because it is outside the subject, outside the predicate, whereas when we are counting thematic relations, thematic roles assigned to different components of a sentence, we include subjects as well. So, when we say that a word like love has two thematic roles to assign, one will be assigned to the subject and the other will be assigned to compliment. Still, we maintain that a word like love has just one compliment, one argument, but it has two thematic roles to assign. An intransitive word will have how many compliments. Get this thing? Is this making sense now? Hope so. So, moving away, this is how a thematic grid looks like. For a sentence like John put the book on the table, it has three theta roles. The predicate is the word put, the it has one external theta role to assign that it assigns to the subject and two thematic roles within the predicate to the two different compliments. In a sentence, sometimes we have, sometimes we find sentences in which we do not have and we have n p's without a theta role. Predicate like rain. Is this a transitive or intransitive or rain? Intranjitive, snow. What is the subject of rain in this kind of a sentence? It rained, clouds rained. Is that a good sentence? English. Do clouds rain? When it falls, we find only water. Anyway, it is the subject, but in such sentences it does not have a thematic role. It only fulfills the requirement that a sentence must have a subject. When something is brought in to fulfill the requirement, that does not become part of thematic grid and in these types of sentences, subject n p's do not receive any theta roles because they are brought in only to fulfill the requirement and the requirement is we cannot have a sentence without a subject. We cannot say rained. We cannot say snowed. Therefore, we have to bring in something to say it rained or it snowed. That is all for today. I sincerely, sincerely request you to look at two things before I discuss case relations tomorrow. One and both are available. I do not remember page numbers from top of my head in the link of Lillian Hegman's book that vision has sent to you as the last email. Both these things are explained in great details at least in 20 pages with lots of examples. Please look at that and then we will be talking about C command, government and case relations next time that we meet. That is all. Thank you.