What is the linking (mapping) problem?

It is the question of how a verb's semantic arguments and their roles are mapped onto syntactic positions such as subject and object, for example why the agent of 'break' is normally the subject in the transitive use but the theme is the subject in 'the window broke'.

Verb Meaning and Argument Structure

Argument structure studies how the meaning of a verb determines the number and semantic roles of its arguments and how these are realized in syntax.

Definition

Argument structure is the lexical specification of the arguments a verb requires together with their semantic roles; it mediates between verb meaning and syntactic realization.

Scope

This topic covers thematic (theta) roles such as agent, patient, theme, and goal; the mapping between a verb's meaning and its syntactic frames; verb classes defined by shared meaning and shared syntactic alternations (after Levin); the dative and causative-inchoative alternations; and lexical aspect (Aktionsart), the classification of predicates as states, activities, accomplishments, and achievements. A central theme is the linking problem: how semantic roles are mapped onto grammatical functions like subject and object.

Core questions

What semantic roles do verbs assign to their arguments, and how are these roles defined?
How does a verb's meaning predict its syntactic alternations and verb-class membership?
How are semantic roles linked to grammatical functions such as subject and object?
How does lexical aspect (state, activity, accomplishment, achievement) structure event meaning?

Key concepts

thematic / theta roles (agent, patient, theme, goal)
argument structure and valency
linking / mapping problem
diathesis alternations (dative, causative)
proto-agent and proto-patient
lexical aspect / Aktionsart
telicity

Key theories

Verb classes and alternations (Levin): Verbs that share components of meaning tend to share the same set of syntactic alternations, so meaning can be diagnosed from syntactic behaviour and verbs grouped into semantically coherent classes.
Thematic proto-roles (Dowty): Rather than a fixed list of discrete theta roles, arguments are characterized by clusters of proto-agent and proto-patient entailments, and argument selection follows from which argument has the most proto-agent properties.
Aspectual (event) classes: Predicates fall into aspectual classes (states, activities, accomplishments, achievements) distinguished by durativity, telicity, and dynamicity, which interact with tense and adverbial modification.

History

Fillmore's case grammar in the late 1960s introduced deep semantic roles, and Vendler's aspectual classification reshaped the study of event types. Dowty's 1991 proto-roles proposal addressed long-standing problems with discrete theta roles, while Levin's 1993 catalogue of English verb classes and alternations established the systematic link between verb meaning and syntactic behaviour that underlies much subsequent work on argument realization.

Debates

Discrete thematic roles vs. proto-roles: Whether arguments bear members of a fixed inventory of discrete semantic roles, or whether role behaviour is better captured by Dowty's graded proto-agent and proto-patient entailments.

Key figures

Beth Levin
Malka Rappaport Hovav
David Dowty
Zeno Vendler
Charles Fillmore

Seminal works

levin1993
dowty1991
levinrappaport2005

Frequently asked questions

What is the linking (mapping) problem?: It is the question of how a verb's semantic arguments and their roles are mapped onto syntactic positions such as subject and object, for example why the agent of 'break' is normally the subject in the transitive use but the theme is the subject in 'the window broke'.