Semantic roles

Oh, no! Another semantics post. Well, yes. Since semantics is at the core of many misunderstandings, it’s worth looking at it from just another perspective in order to see if your meaning is my meaning. When speaking of semantics and meaning, we need to distinguish between words that carry meaning and those that are primarily used for conveying grammatical information. Leaving the latter aside, semantic meaning is attached to verbs, adjectives and nouns. In this article I will shortly sum up semantic roles as a possibility to categorize the meaning of nouns. You all heard of subject and object as grammar categories. Sometimes these are not sufficient from a semantic point of view as they are grammatical categories, not semantic ones. A common classroom example at university went like this: The boy hit the girl with the hammer. This is not just cruel, it is also somewhat ambiguous. Did the boy use the hammer to hit the girl (very cruel) or did the girl hold a hammer while the boy hit her (still cruel, but at least she can properly strike back now)? The ambiguity is that for the first understanding the hammer is an instrument, while for the second the hammer is a passive object. So if we just have a look at the nouns in that sentences and attach a label to each it would be boy (action initiator), girl (sufferer), hammer (instrument or passive object). This is – on a very rough level – what semantic roles are about. Label each noun not just with a grammatical category like subject or object, but with a semantic category as well. The number of categories varies from author to author, but most go along the lines of these: