Discuss case, thematic roles and theta theory by citing relevant examples?

The understandings of cases of NP are very crucial towards the understanding of semantic features and rules.

For example, in sentence “He is intelligent”; “He is in nominative case because ‘He is the subject. 

In sentence “John saw him yesterday, him is in Accusative case because him is the direct object of the verb ‘saw’. And in sentence, “This is house”, this is the possessive or genitive case because there is a notion of possession attached to it.

The Notion of Thematic Role

To understand the concept of thematic role let us consider two sentences, (A) The door opened (B) The guard opened the door.

In sentence A, the door’ acts like a subject whereas in sentence B ‘the door becomes the direct object’.

So that we can say that the door is in thematic role in respect of both sentences. However the NP ‘the guard’ is the thematic role AGENT who in real sense performed the action of opening the door.

Case

Case Assignment and Case Theory: It is not necessary for a syntactic case to be represented by different case form.

For example, common noun such as book, cat, dog etc. do not have different case-form for Nominative and Accusative forms.

In English language it is necessary for a NP to have a syntactic case, though it might not express in different form. If a NP will not have a case form it won’t be able to connect itself with the sentence. 

This is what generative grammarians called case – filter. According to them, “noun phrase is ungrammatical if it does not have a syntactic case”. This further give way to another term called Case Theory.

Case Theory is a sub part of generative grammar which deals with case filter and case assignment in a NP or sentence. Case and NP-movement

Case is also important in a movement transformation called NP-movement. Passivisation movement is the sub part of NP movement.

Therefore a passive sentence like, “the mangoes were eaten (by the children) is derived from “- past + be eaten the mangoes (by the children)”.

Subject to subject raising is another kind of NP-movement, which is also known as raising to subject.

This movement is responsible for the upward movement of subject of a complete clause to the subject position of the next higher clause.

Exceptional Case Marking: Till now we have seen that it is essential for a NP to have a syntactic case. But there is certain class of construction wherein NP is unable to find a syntactic case for itself through usual channel.

The assignment of syntactic case to these NPs is called Exceptional Case Marking, or ECM. Consider the sentence: “My mother wants (me to go to the market).

In this sentence ‘me’ bears Accusative case instead of expected Nominative case. It is Exceptional case marking which is responsible for the accusative case of ‘me’. THEMATIC ROLES 

Basic Thematic Roles: The thematic role expresses the meaning that a noun phrase plays with respect to the action or state described by a sentence’s verb.

For example, in the sentence “Susan ate an apple”, Susan is the doer of the eating, so she is an agent; the apple is the item that is eaten, so it is a patient.

It is often convenient to identify arguments of (Fregean) predicates in terms of the following thematic roles, which are: agent, instrument, cause experiencer, recipient, path, location, measure and theme.

Thematic Role and Theta Theory: In generative grammar (in particular Government and binding theory and the Standard Theory of Transformational Grammar),

a theta role or role is the formal device for representing syntactic argument structure (the number and type of noun phrases) required syntactically by a particular verb. For example, the verb put requires three arguments (ie.it is rivalent).

The formal mechanism for implementing this requirement is based in theta roles. The verb put is said to “assign” three theta roles.

This is coded in a theta grid associated with the lexical entry for the verb.

The correspondence between the theta grid and the actual sentence is accomplished by means of a bijective filter on the grammar known as the Theta Criterion.

Thematic Role and Case: It is easy to find a lot of correlation between certain cases and certain thematic roles. 

For example, if an argument NP is in Nominative case it must acquire the thematic role of AGENT or EXPERIENCER, and if an argument NP is in accusative case it must acquire the thematic role of THEME (OR PATIENT).

But these correlations between the case and thematic role, is not always uniform. An argument NP can have the same thematic role but different case.

For example, “They often like amusing toys” and “Amusing toys are often liked by them”. In first the sentences ‘they’ bears the role of experiencer and in second sentence them’ bears the role of experiencer.

But the cases are different in both the sentences.

The notion or concept of thematic roles or thematic relations plays a significant role in English.

Thematic roles are closer to actual meanings of noun phrases than either grammatical functions or cases are. Thematic roles are also called theta roles.

Basically, the theta role is a semantic role played by a Noun Phrase (NP) in its capacity as an argument to a verb or preposition, or sometimes an adjective like fond (of) or worth.

The lexicon in the generative grammar of a given language carries S-selection information about the thematic (theta) roles required by a given lexical item.

The Theta theory states that every argument Noun Phrase (NP) must be assigned one and only one thematic role. This also means that every thematic role must be assigned to one and only one argument. 

Two basic thematic roles are Agent and Theme. For example, in the two sentences. The story is good and I read the story.

The Theme is story and Agent in second sentence is I. There could be many such thematic roles for a given noun phrase.

Thematic Roles and the Theta Theory: The part of generative grammar that deals solely with thematic roles is called Theta Theory (also written as “-theory”).

Thematic roles are also called as O-roles or theta roles for short. Theta theory is based on the principle of Theta criterion.

Theta Criterion: Every argument noun phrase (NP) in a sentence bears one and only one theta role, and each theta role is assigned to one and only one argument NP.

This criterion ensures that no noun phrase that is selected by the lexical entry for a given verb or predicate adjective, or even preposition can be in a sentence without being given a proper thematic role.

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