Semantic roles in a sentence [closed]
Can someone explain me what a semantic role in a sentence is? From my understanding is it subject–verb–object relationship? Take this sentence:
The Rhine River takes its source in Switzerland before flowing through Basel and Strasbourg in Alsace Lorraine.
Would the subject be the Rhine river, the verb takes and the object its source in Switzerland? Or would the object be its source in Switzerland before flowing through Basel and Strasbourg in Alsace Lorraine.
Thank you.
Solution 1:
Sentence analysis
There already are good answers in the comments, and I concur that I am a bit unsure what you are looking for, but I’ll have a jab at it. Let us first analyse your sentence:
The Rhine River takes its source in Switzerland before flowing through Basel and Strasbourg in Alsace Lorraine.
The subject of the sentence is ‘the Rhine River’; the verb ‘takes’ is transitive, and thus takes an object, which in the first part of the sentence is ‘its source’. The second part of the sentence is broken off by ‘before’, which I here understand as a conjunction.
CONJUNCTION
1 In advance of the time when.
‘they lived rough for four days before they were arrested’
—Oxford Dictionary: ‘before’
This allows us to analyse the second sentence as keeping the subject from the first one (‘the Rhine River’). We can replace this with the pronoun ‘it’, understanding the second sentence as:
[…] before [it is] flowing […]
The verb ‘to be’ (ɔ: ‘is’) is intransitive; intransitive verbs do not take objects, but can take predicates. Predicates behave sort of like objects, but the verb functions more like an equals sign, hence:
Bob is a blue boy →
Bob = a blue boy →
Bob [is the same as] a blue boy
In your sentence, there is no predicate after flowing, merely an adverbial phrase telling us where the flowing is taking place.
Defining ‘semantic roles’
A semantic role is, according to the peer-reviewed encyclopaedia Store norske leksikon:
semantisk rolle
Semantisk rolle, en beskrivelse eller definisjon av et syntaktisk ledd og dets funksjon i en setning. De to vanligste rollene er agens og patiens (eller tema) som henholdsvis beskriver agenten eller utøveren av en setning (vanligvis, men ikke alltid subjektet) og den eller det som det blir gjort noe med (vanligvis det direkte objektet).
semantic role
Semantic role, a description or definition of a syntactic element and its function in a sentence. The two most common roles are agens and patiens (or topos) which respectively describe the agent or practitioner of a sentence (usually, but not always, the subject) and the one or the thing which something is acted upon (usually the direct object).
Final answer
Thus, the semantic roles in your example sentence are performed by: in the first part ‘the Rhine River’ (agens – the agent) and ‘source’ (here it sort of is the patiens); and in the second part an unexpressed agens, ɔ: ‘it’.