What is the Semantic Role of "Ahmed" in the following sentence:

The rain made Ahmed shiver.

Question

What is the Semantic Role of "Ahmed" in the following sentence:

The rain made Ahmed shiver.

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

When parsing the sentence, different semantic roles could be attributed to Ahmed depending on how you view the relationship between Ahmed and the verb 'shiver.'
Option 1: Agent. This would assign the role to the doer of an action. In 'The rain made Ahmed shiver,' Ahmed is not performing an action; the rain is causing the reaction. Therefore, labeling Ahmed as Agent would be inaccurate because there is no intentional doer performing the main action on Ahmed.
Option 2: Cause. The rain is the trigger that brings about Ahmed's shivering. While it is true that the rain serves as the cause of the event, the semantic role in relation to Ahmed specifically is not 'Cause' because we’re identifying Ahmed’s role in the event, not the initiator of the event itself. The rain is the external cause, not Ahmed’s own role in the action he experiences.
Option 3: Patient. The Patient is typically the entity that undergoes the action or is affected by it in a direct way. In this sentence, Ahmed is not being acted upon or transformed by Ahmed himself; rather, he is the one who experiences the reaction. Thus labeling Ahmed as Patient would be misrepresenting his involvement in the event process.
Option 4: Experiencer. The Experiencer semantic role is used for entities that perceive, feel, or experience a mental or bodily state described by the verb—in this case, Ahmed experiences the sensation or reaction (shiver) due to the rain. This aligns with how stative or psychological verbs are treated, where the subject undergoes the experience rather than performing the action or being the object of the action.

To recap, the contrast hinges on who is undergoing the action versus who is causing or affected by it. While the rain acts as the cause of the shivering, Ahmed's role is not as the actor or the patient of an action; rather, he experiences the state described by the verb, which corresponds to the Experiencer role. This distinction helps distinguish the options logically and shows why the other candidates do not fit Ahmed’s function in the event.

LIN 001Y A01-A12 SQ 2025 Semantics HW

What is the Semantic Role of "Ahmed" in the following sentence: The rain made Ahmed shiver.

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