Perspectives on semantic roles. An introduction

Introduced in the late 1960s by Gruber (1965) and Fillmore (1968, 1971), semantic roles (or ‘thematic roles’, ‘deep cases’, ‘thematic relations’, ‘theta roles’) have become as indispensable for linguistic analysis across theoretical frameworks as they are controversial in multiple respects, as argued among others by Newmeyer (2010). In general, semantic roles are taken to refer to the roles taken by participants in an event (see Kittilä, Västi & Ylikoski 2011: 7). Semantic roles are encoded through a variety of morphosyntactic means crosslinguistically. Such morphosyntactic coding devices can be seen as exponents of semantic roles; consequently, it is important to clarify their status. In the first place, semantic roles can be encoded by morphological cases. In addition, semantic roles are frequently encoded by adpositions, or even by adpositions plus (possibly different) cases. In head-marking languages, semantic roles can be indicated by verb affixes, and some basic semantic roles are indicated by word order in inflectionally poor languages such as English.