Theta criterion

In syntax, the theta criterion (in its original form) states that in a grammatical sentence, every theta role that a verb can assign must be realized by some argument, and each argument may bear only a single theta role. [cite book|title=Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures|author=Chomsky, Noam|year=1981/1993|publisher=Mouton de Gruyter See p. 36] So, for instance, for the verb "send", which is associated with the theta-roles of Agent, Goal and Theme, a well formed sentence might look like this:

*"Robert sent Mary a package."

Here, the three theta roles are assigned to "Robert", "Mary" and "a package", respectively. The sentence would be malformed if any of these arguments were absent.

Apparent violations

It is often noted that sometimes arguments of the verb are not overtly present, and that sometimes the verb may take more arguments than specified in the lexicon:

# Gladius Maximus died "the death" befitting a Roman soldier.
# John "ate".
# "Going" to the store, "be" back later!

Linguists often explain sentences 2 and 3, where the verbs seem to be missing arguments, by positing a silent pronoun (PRO) that occupies the phonologically empty argument positions. This can be justified by noting that one cannot get the meaning from sentence 2 that John ate something inedible, such as a rock, and that in sentence 3 there is a clear implied first-person subject.

In sentence 1, however, there is no clear theta-position that "the death" is occupying; it is unclear what licenses this cognate object, producing a pseudo-transitive use of the verb "died".

References