Thematic Roles as Verb-specific Concepts

Thematic roles are typically viewed as slot and filler m echanisms in which the slots are devoid of content, or the content is limited to a few syntactically relevant features. This traditional view excludes important knowledge that people possess about who tends to do what to whom in specific situations. Thus it was extended here by treating thematic roles as verb-specific, feature-based concepts. In Experiment 1, subjects produced features for agent and patient roles such as "someone who is frightened". Role/filler typicality ratings, in which subjects provided judgements for questions such as "How common is it for a monster to frighten som eone?" (i.e. monster as an agent of frighten), were collected in Experiment 2A. In Experiment 2B, different subjects were presented with the role features from Experiment 1 and the typical agents and patients from Experiment 2A. They were asked to rate how central each of the role features was to the nominal concepts, and role/filler featural similarity was calculate...

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