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

Jane gave the flowers to Jessica

Question

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

Jane gave the flowers to Jessica

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

Question restatement: What is the Semantic Role of "Jane" in the sentence 'Jane gave the flowers to Jessica'?

Option 1: Agent
This choice identifies the doer of the action. In the scene, Jane is the one who performs the action of giving, i.e., she initiates and carries out the transfer of flowers. In many semantic role frameworks, the agent is the entity responsible for the action described by the verb, especially when the entity initiates a voluntary transfer.

Option 2: Patient
The patient typically denotes the entity that is directly affected by the action or undergoes a change of state. Here, the flowers are the direct object that receive the action of giving, not Jane. Labeling Jane as the patient would misplace the role of the thing that is affected rather than the one who performs the action.

Option 3: Recipient
The recipient is the entity that receives something as a result of the action. In this sentence, Jessica is the recipient since she is the person to whom the flowers are given. Assigning Jane this role would blur who receives rather than who performs.

Option 4: Subject
In semantic role labeling, 'subject' is a syntactic term, not a precise semantic role like Agent or Recipient. Although Jane appears as the sentence's subject in some grammatical analyses, the target of the question is the semantic role, which is best captured by Agent for this clause.

Option 5: Object
'Object' is a broad syntactic category and, in semantic role terms, usually corresponds to the theme/patient or patient-like role. The flowers themselves are the object of the giving action, not Jane. Calling Jane the object would incorrectly label the performer as a thing being acted upon.

Summary perspective: The core action is Jane performing the act of giving. That makes Jane the agent—the initiator of the action. The other roles (recipient: Jessica; patient/theme: the flowers; subject: syntactic label; object: too broad/syntactic) do not correctly capture the semantic role of Jane in this clause.

LIN 001Y A01-A12 SQ 2025 Semantics HW

What is the Semantic Role of "Jane" in the following sentence: Jane gave the flowers to Jessica

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