Marking of Theta-Roles from a Typological Perspective

Theta-roles,which are semantic notions identifying roles that nouns play in the predication of events,are either phoneti-cally expressed or unexpressed.Comparison of how various languages encode nouns’theta-roles in strings of speech sounds re-veals that some do so morphologically while others do so lexically and syntactically.Meanwhile,examination of how pronouns’the-ta-roles are marked across languages indicates that theta-roles,rather than being treated equally,are ranked in terms of whether tobe morphologically encoded or not.As researches endeavor to compare languages,it is indispensable to bear in mind the dual na-ture of language:meaning and sound.