Abstract
The status of thematic roles such as Agent and Patient in cognitive science is highly controversial: To some they are universal components of core knowledge, to others they are scholarly fictions without psychological reality. We address this debate by posing two critical questions: to what extent do humans represent events in terms of abstract role categories, and to what extent are these categories shaped by universal cognitive biases? We review a range of literature that contributes answers to these questions: psycholinguistic and event cognition experiments with adults, children, and infants; typological studies grounded in cross-linguistic data; and studies of emerging sign languages. We pose these questions for a variety of roles and find that the answers depend on the role. For Agents and Patients, there is strong evidence for abstract role categories and a universal bias to distinguish the two roles. For Goals and Recipients, we find clear evidence for abstraction but mixed evidence as to whether there is a bias to encode Goals and Recipients as part of one or two distinct categories. Finally, we discuss the Instrumental role and do not find clear evidence for either abstraction or universal biases to structure instrumental categories.
Highlights
Thematic roles such as Agent, Patient, and Goal have a longstanding presence in theories of linguistics and cognitive science
The study of thematic roles is the study of event participant categories, and studying these categories provides an opportunity to gain insight into the interface between conceptual and semantic knowledge
As thematic roles are largely not labeled through open class lexical items, such conflation is not possible in the domain of event participant categories
Summary
Thematic roles such as Agent, Patient, and Goal have a longstanding presence in theories of linguistics and cognitive science. The sentence the journalist checked the spelling is processed more quickly than the mechanic checked the spelling (Bicknell et al, 2010) Given this detailed event- and verbspecific knowledge, in combination with the difficulty of defining and identifying thematic roles, the question arises as to whether abstract participant categories have a place in a theory of cognition. The existence of abstract Agent and Patient roles in specific languages/ cultures is supported by studies of event cognition and sentence comprehension. This suggests that infants have an abstract agency schema, allowing them to interpret novel, unfamiliar events as goaldirected
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