We present the first large-scale, corpus based verification of Dowty’s seminal theory of proto-roles. Our results demonstrate both the need for and the feasibility of a property-based annotation scheme of semantic relationships, as opposed to the currently dominant notion of categorical roles.

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I present an ordering semantics for modality in which possible worlds are ordered by ordering sources augmented with a partial order structure. This extension of Kratzer’s (1991) ordering semantics allows propositions to contribute to the ideal defined by an ordering source with differing degrees of priority and allows this priority relation to vary with the world of evaluation. Although the * operator of Katz et al. (2012) also allows ordering sources to be combined with different degrees of priority, I show that it does not account for a variant of Goble’s (1996) Medicine Problem in which a modal is embedded under an attitude verb. I also extend the investigation by Katz et al. (2012) into the combinatorial structure of complex ordering sources by proposing a generalization of their * operator for partially ordered ordering sources.

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A linking theory explains how verbs' semantic arguments are mapped to their syntactic arguments-the inverse of the semantic role labeling task from the shallow semantic parsing literature. In this paper, we develop the computational linking theory framework as a method for implementing and testing linking theories proposed in the theoretical literature. We deploy this framework to assess two crosscutting types of linking theory: local v. global models and categorical v. featural models. To further investigate the behavior of these models, we develop a measurement model in the spirit of previous work in semantic role induction: the semantic proto-role linking model. We use this model, which implements a generalization of Dowty's seminal proto-role theory, to induce semantic proto-roles, which we compare to those Dowty proposes.