An investigation into semantic roles in German and Thai

Abstract

Abstract

The semantic roles are based on the concept of language universals, that according to the Fillmore’s conception, underlie every language. The language universals exist in the deep structure of natural languages. From that concept, Fillmore derives the semantic roles in these following categories: agentive, instrumental, dative, factitive, locative and objective. In the subsequent Publication, Fillmore develops these categories. So, his subsequent developed model contains the following semantic roles: agent, experiencer, instrumental, source, goal, locative, object, time and beneficative. In the research literatures,

there is no consensus on the amount of the semantic roles. The current study wants to provide a contribution to this question. The prototype theory is used in this study. The results of the study show that das Agens role and das Patiens role are most commonly implemented in the corpus data. Furthermore, the differentiation of the semantic roles can not be established, because the propositional content and the frame semantic of the sentences change constantly depending on situational knowledge and action-oriented experience.