Relations and roles in action verbs

Language speakers or signers use a verb to pick out a constraint in a scene (or a less concrete situation, often by metaphor) where something is happening. The verb classifies the scene with as an event type, and the verb-constraint is the relation of the Before subscene-type to an After subscene type. Attunement to the verb-constraint allows a speaker-hearer who recognizes (and perhaps expresses with) the verb to construct a shared information state with a number of expected participants, some of which are obligatory in the syntax. What is happening in the action scene is there is a relevant shift from a Before configuration of participants to an After configuration. There may be many different relations picked out in the scene (to a greater or lesser extent), but the most important one is the verb-constraint linking Before and After. It allows the users of the verb-containing utterance to acquire information about the action scene in time, that the action started presupposing the participants in the Before subscene-type and resulted in a situation of an After subscene-type with the participants in a new configuation. A clausal expression predicates that the verb-constraint obtains in the action scene, and creates conditions of satisfaction for a successful communicative act. The receiver of the utterance, if attuned to the verb-constraint, can understand those conditions of satisfaction which can affect their cognition via a shared information state and subsequently their perception and action in the world.

Other relations in the action scene are between the participants. However, certain relations are made explicit by the form of the utterance, by the relation of the participant argument (typically a referring phrase, an NP) to the head verb. The most important (and thus least oblique) argument role defines a relation to the action mentioned by the head verb called a thematic role of Agent. This is in a world where relevant action is performed by other humans, or animals that behave with intentionality and volition similar to humans. A more general thematic role that does not require intention is Effector. Both Agents and Effectors pick out the Initiator of an action occurring. In the Stanford CSLI Verb Semantic Ontology, the two are sometimes not distinguished, and assigned the thematic Role of EFNT, which I guess means Effector-Agent but could simple be pronounced Initiator.

A prototypical type of action scene involves an Agent manipulating an object in the scene. That object may take the role of Patient or Theme. A Patient is structurally changed by the Action, while a Theme may be moved, said or experienced but does not undergo structural change.

Sowa's IRMPACO ontology in Appendix B of his book Knowledge Representation [Sowa 2000] sets out 18 thematic roles, classified according to four kinds that are reminiscent of Aristotle's four aitiae (singluar aitia), traditionally translated as causes (effective, material, formal, ultimate). In an orthogonal dimension, they are classified as Action, Process, Transfer, Spatial, Temporal and Ambient.

It is worth analyzing those 18 roles further, in relation to Goldberg's analysis of constructions (and FrameNet's semantic frames), but that is the subject of a different posting. This a way of exploring verbs and their arguments, and can be contributed to the Stanford CSLI Semantic Verb Ontology. That resource already considers WordNet, I would want to explore mappings to COBUILD and FrameNet.