L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #347 semantic role vs. grammatical role

MJ. Smith

Another tip of the day (TOTD) series fo r Logos/Verbum 10. They will be short and often drawn from forum posts. Feel free to ask questions and/or suggest forum posts you'd like to see included. Adding comments about the behavior on mobile and web apps would be appreciated by your fellow forumites. A search for "L/V 10+ Tip of the Day site:community.logos.com" on Google should bring the tips up as should this Reading List within the application.

This tip is inspired by the forum post: Clause search: the rational between Agent and Subject - Logos Forums

Graham Criddle said:

Nielsen Tomazini said:

Please see that Exodus 32.14 appears in both results, however I don't have Genesis 6.6-7 when I search for God as an Agent. Why so? The Exodus text is quite similar to the Genesis ones.

The Genesis 6 occurrences are tagged as "experiencer"

An agent is defined as someone who instigates an action or changes a change in someone / thing else

An experiencer is defined as someone who experiences a state or a mental event or activity.

My speculation is that the Gen verses are tagged with experiencer because they are focusing on how God felt, whereas the Exodus passages are tagged as agent because the "relenting" is tied up with how God is going to act.

MJ. Smith said:

Graham provided a good answer. However, I'd like to convince you that the question itself is a bit off. You should not expect there to be a set relationship between subject and agent. For example:

• Mary hit Tom with a ball.
• Tom was hit by a ball thrown by Mary.
• A ball, thrown by Mary, hit Tom.

The subjects are Mary, Tom, ball respectively ... but in all cases it was Mary who was the agent and poor Tom who got the bruise. Yes, there are discernible constraints within a given language as to possible grammatical roles for a semantic role. Unfortunately, I can't find a straightforward article on mapping semantic roles to grammatical functions.