The role of thematic structures in interpretation and parsing

Abstract

Abstract This paper explores how thematic role information associated with verbs is used in language processing. We suggest that thematic roles are useful for co-ordinating different types of information in language processing because they represent aspects of conceptual/semantic representation that map directly on to syntactic form. We review some recent studies investigating the use of thematic information in syntactic ambiguity resolution and present some new evidence that thematic information can be used to eliminate completely the garden path typically associated with reduced-relative clauses. We then review some of our recent work investigating lexical structure in the processing of sentences with long-distance dependencies, and conclude that thematic structure guides the initial interpretation of these sentences. We conclude with a discussion about how thematic information might enable the processing system to make early semantic commitments that take into account relevant aspects of discourse context.