Are thematic relations discrete?

The class of prepositional passivizable verbs in English

“…As noted above, the specific property or entailment [cause], as it will be labelled for short here, occupies the third position in Dowty's paradigm, although it must be emphasized that the author does not impose any specific hierarchical order on the properties or entailments making up the paradigm. Prior to Dowty (1991), a binary-feature approach to thematic theory like that of Rozwadowska (1988Rozwadowska ( , 1989) similarly postulates [þ cause] for the analysis or description of entities that execute some action, and Davis and Koenig (2000) and also Koenig and Davis (2001), who developed a theory of lexical semantics as based on the proto-role entailments approach of Dowty (1991), also endorse [cause] as a relevant property of actor or agent arguments. 13 Now, what matters for the purpose of the present study is that because [cause] is a basic property (or entailment) of the subject argument of activity verbs in active sentences, as is argued explicitly in the cited works, the fact that prepositional activity verbs allow for passivization must mean that the subject argument of prepositional passives (i.e.…”

“…Effectively, as is the case with the subject argument of transitive verbs of experience, the subject argument of prepositional verbs of experience appears to respond to the property or entailment "sentience (and/or perception)", where sentience denotes any given mental or emotional type of process and perception specifies a meaning related to the (outer) senses. The feature system of Rozwadowska (1988Rozwadowska ( , 1989) similarly includes [þ sentient] in the description of an entity that experiments with some kind of psychological or emotional process, and, for their part, Koenig & Davis (2001) use sentience as a cover term for entities involved in psychological processes and likewise in processes of perception or cognition. For expository reasons, the present discussion makes use of a wide reading of the property [sentience] and proposes to characterize the subject argument of the verbs in (14) above as a sentient entity.…”

Semantic-role prominence is contingent on referent prominence in discourse: Experimental evidence from impersonals and passives in Polish

“…However, there is one major difference that sets Dowty's model apart from other feature-based accounts without a specified mechanism for feature interaction (e.g. Cruse 1973;Rozwadowska 1988;1989;Schlesinger 1992;Reinhart 2002): feature accumulation as the key mechanism to determine role prototypicality. Dowty specifically assumes that feature accumulation distinguishes subtypes of agentive or patientive roles as it helps to rank them according to their proximity to the role prototype.…”

Thematics and Conceptual Semantics of English Middle Verbs

“…(1) above): (7) put: th-s, th-d, th-1 [J aeggli 1986], put: th-1, th-2, th-3 [Hoekstra 1984]. M o re recently, Rozwadowska [1989] proposes a feature-based a p p ro ach to th-roles. A fter analyzing derived nom inals, Polish im personal co n structions, Polish reflexive verbs, and binding o f an a p h o ra in experiential constru ctio n s, she com es to a conclusion th at instead o f treating th-roles as discrete undecom posable atom ic wholes, it is m ore ap p ro p riate to view them as bundles o f features, such as [ + / -sentient], [ + / -cause], and…”