THEMATIC ROLE

1. (Semantics) Thematic roles such as Agent, Patient, and Goal have a long-standing presence in theories of linguistics and cognitive science. By way of illustration, the verb eat encodes a relation between someone who eats and something that gets eaten: these participants have been given the role labels Agent and Patient, respectively. Thematic roles are routinely invoked in studies of the syntax∼semantics interface, language production and comprehension, and child language learning. They are argued to be part of innate, core knowledge (Carey 2009; Strickland 2016), to be cross-culturally universal (Fillmore 1968), and to have played a pivotal role in language evolution (Calvin and Bickerton 2000).
    Despite this prevalence, discussion of the problematic nature of thematic roles also has a long-standing tradition. Dowty (1991) states "there is perhaps no concept in modern syntactic and semantic theory which is so often involved in so wide a range of contexts, but on which there is so little agreement as to its nature and definition, as thematic role". Nearly 20 years later, Newmeyer (2010) evinces a similar sentiment: "there is no construct as murky in any subdivision of linguistic theory as that of 'thematic role'. Literally dozens have been proposed over the years, and nothing approaching a consensus has been achieved in terms of delineating the set that are needed for natural language semantics". | Lilia Rissman and Asifa Majid, 2019
2. (Semantics) It is often convenient to identify arguments of (Fregean) predicates in terms of the following thematic roles:
    Agent, Cause, Instrument: Agents are arguments that bring about a state of affairs. The line between agents, on the one hand, and causes or instruments, on the other, can be fuzzy, but agents are (or are perceived to be) conscious or sentient, in a way that causes or instruments aren't.
   1. Agent: The lions devoured the wildebeest.
   2. Cause: Hurricane-force winds demolished much of the town.
   3. Instrument: This key opens the door to the main office.
    Experiencers are arguments that undergo a sensory, cognitive, or emotional experience.
   4. The rhesus monkey had never seen snow before.
    Recipients are arguments that receive something (whether good or bad) in a situation.
   5. They gave the workers a raise.
    Locations are simply places.
   6. We always eat breakfast in the kitchen.
    Paths connect locations.
   7. Lucky raced down the driveway.
    When locations serve as endpoints of paths, we generally refer to them as goals.
   8. We traveled to Paris quite a bit in those days.
    Measure or amount arguments express extensions along some dimension (length, duration, cost, and so on).
   9. They rowed for three days.
    Finally, the thematic role of theme is something of a catch-all. According to one definition, theme refers to an argument undergoing motion of some sort, including motion in a metaphorical sense, such as a change of state. As is usual in the syntactic literature, we will also use the term for arguments that are most "affected" in a situation or for the content of an experience.
   10. The lions devoured the wildebeest.
   11. This key opens the front door.
   12. Hurricane-force winds demolished much of the town.
   13. They gave the workers a raise.
   14. I'd like to send this package to France.
   15. Many people fear snakes.
    | Beatrice Santorini and Anthony Kroch, 2007

THEMATIC VOWEL
(Morphology) Or, theme vowel. In Indo-European studies, the vowel *e or *o from ablaut placed before the ending of a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs in the Indo-European languages with this vowel are thematic, and those without it are athematic.
 Used more generally, a thematic vowel is any vowel found at the end of the stem of a word. Outside Indo-European, the term thematic vowel is also used in the grammar of Kartvelian languages.
 PIE verbs and nominals (nouns and adjectives) consist of three parts:

[_Word [_Stem root + suffix ] + ending ]

1. *g^whér-mo-s 'heat' > Ancient Greek θέρμος (thérmos)
2. *b^hér-e-ti '(he) bears' > Sanskrit bhárati, Gothic baíriþ

3. *ph₂-tér-s 'father' > English father
4. *h₁és-mi '(I) am' > English am

THEMATIZATION
(Discourse) Discourse producers, particularly those producing written discourse, will often arrange smaller chunks of the text in a certain order so as to give prominence to that chunk or to another chunk. These chunks are composed of thematically related material. For example, it is not uncommon for writers to begin with one discourse chunk made up of one or more broad propositions only to follow that chunk with another (or series of others) that draws specific points from those preceding propositions. This kind of organization is often referred to as thematization, though I prefer to use the less technical term staging.
 Given that linearization affects both the smaller and larger ranks of discourse (from the clause up), then it stands to reason that one ought to be able to determine the thematic structure at the discourse level by determining the thematization in each of its constituent parts. | James D. Dvorak, 2008

THETA CRITERION
(Syntax) As is well known, Chomsky's Theta-Criterion actually has two versions. Let us discuss the earlier version first.

1. Theta-Criterion (Chomsky 1981)
   Each argument bears one and only one theta-role, and each theta-role is assigned to one and only one argument.

2. Theta-Criterion (Chomsky 1986)
   Each argument a appears in a chain containing a unique visible theta-position P, and each theta-position P is visible in a chain containing a unique argument α.

3. John left the room angry.

THETA-ROLE

1. (Semantics) The semantic relationship of an argument with the predicate it is an argument of is expressed through the assignment of a role by the predicate to the argument, in conformity with the theta-criterion. Different theta-roles have different labels, such as Agent and Theme. E.g., in Ken sent me, the argument Ken is the Agent of the predicate sent me, and the argument me is the Theme of the predicate sent. Other theta-roles that have been distinguished are Goal, Source, Experiencer. | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
2. (Semantics) Or, thematic role. The semantic relationship of an argument with its predicate is expressed through the assignment of a role by the predicate to the argument. Different theta-roles have different labels, such as Agent, Theme, Patient, Goal, Source, Experiencer, etc. Example:
   1. Bart kicked the ball.
      kicked → predicate
      Bart → Agent
      ball → Theme/Patient
   2. The ball was kicked by Bart.
      kicked → predicate
      Bart → Agent
      ball → Theme/Patient
    | Laura Kallmeyer and Benjamin Burkhardt, 2018

THETIC CONSTRUCTION
(Grammar) A subtype of sentence focus construction characterized by a maximal degree of informational integration. Theticity is thus understood as referring to a range of formally defined (language-specific) construction types, not to a "logical" utterance type, despite the historical origin of the term in a more philosophical tradition (for discussion, see Kuroda 1972, Sasse 1987). Both the English example in (1) and the Hungarian example in (2) are typical sentence focus utterances of the thetic type, most felicitous as an answer to a general question such as What's going on?

1. English
   There's a knock on the door!
2. Hungarian (Uralic)
   Jönnek
   come.PRS

   a
   DEF

   szomszédok.
   neighbor.PL

   'The NEIGHBORS are coming!' (Sasse 2006)

THETICAL GRAMMAR
(Discourse) One of the two domains of discourse grammar, the other domain being sentence grammar. The building blocks of thetical grammar are theticals (Kaltenböck 2011), that is, linguistic expressions which are interpolated in, or juxtaposed to, clauses or sentences but syntactically, semantically and, typically, prosodically independent from these structures. The two domains are associated with contrasting principles of designing texts: Whereas sentence grammar is essentially restricted to the structure of sentences in a propositional format, thetical grammar concerns the overall contours of discourse beyond the sentence, thereby being responsible for a higher level of discourse production (Kaltenböck, Heine, and Kuteva 2011, Heine et al 2013).
 The following example, taken from the Comprehensive Grammar of English (1985), illustrates the main characteristics of thetical grammar.

1. They considered Miss Hartley a very good teacher.
2. They considered Miss Hartley, a very good teacher.

• They are syntactically unattached.
• They are typically set off prosodically from the rest of the utterance.
• Their meaning is non-restrictive.
• They tend to be positionally mobile.
• Their internal structure is built on principles of sentence grammar but can be elliptic.

TOBI

1. (Prosody) Acronym for Tones and Break Indices. A set of conventions for transcribing and annotating the prosody of speech.
    A full ToBI transcription consists of six parts:
   1. An audio recording.
   2. An electronic print-out or paper record of the F0 (fundamental pitch).
   3. A tones tier, with an analysis of the tonal events in terms of H and L.
   4. A words tier with the words of the utterance in ordinary writing.
   5. A break-index tier showing the strength of the junctures.
   6. A miscellaneous tier with comments. (Cooper 2015)
    Tonal events include:
   • Pitch accents, written as H* or L* (high and low tones, respectively), are typically realized on words that carry the most information in a sentence. Other kinds of pitch accents include L*+H (a syllable which starts with a low accent and then rises) and L+H* (again low-high on one syllable, but with the second part accented) (Port 1999).
   • Phrase accents, written H- or L-, are the tones between a pitch accent and a boundary tone. For example, the intonation at the end of a question might be H*L-H%, indicating that the pitch starts high, falls to a low, and rises again.(Port 1999)
   • Boundary tones, written with H% and L%, are affiliated not to words but to phrase edges.
    Break indices are numbers indicating how strong the break is between words (Port 1999):
   • 0 = clitic boundary, e.g. who's.
   • 1 = normal word boundary.
   • 2 = perceived juncture with no intonation effect, or apparent intonational boundary without a pause or any other clues.
   • 3 = intermediate phrase, marked with H- or L-.
   • 4 = full intonation phrase, marked L% or H%, at the end of a phrase or sentence.
    | Wikipedia, 2022
2. (Prosody) The most useful method for transcribing English prosody (and many other languages). There are 3 types of tone:
   • Pitch accents (H* peak, L* low, L*+H scoop, L+H* rising peak, H+!H downstep high).
   • Phrasal tones (H-, L-).
   • Final boundary tones (L%, H%).
    Some common patterns are the Declarative phrase intonation, List item intonation, and Nuclear accent (a pitch accent near the end of an intonation phrase). | Robert F. Port, 1999

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