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

Jane gave the flowers to Jessica

Question

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

Jane gave the flowers to Jessica

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

To begin, we identify the roles in the sentence: 'Jane' is the doer of the action and is typically labeled as the Agent. 
Option 1: Agent. This would assign the role to Jane, the entity performing the action of giving. Since the question focuses on the role of 'the flowers', this option does not describe the semantic role of the mentioned noun phrase. 
Option 2: Patient. Here, 'the flowers' are the entity that undergoes the transfer in the event of giving; they are the entity being acted upon and changed in possession. In many semantic frameworks, this is labeled as the Patient (or Theme) because it is the entity that is moved or affected by the action. This aligns with the idea of the flowers being the thing that is given. 
Option 3: Recipient. The recipient would be the entity that receives something as a result of the action. In this sentence, 'Jessica' is the recipient of the flowers, not the flowers themselves, so this option does not describe the semantic role of 'the flowers'. 
Option 4: Subject. While 'Jane' is the subject in the syntactic sense, the term Subject is not typically used as a core semantic role for the entity undergoing the action in a ditransitive giving event; the term Subject is more about syntax than the role of the thing being transferred. 
Option 5: Direct Object. The direct object is the syntactic counterpart of the theme in many transitive constructions; however, the question asks for semantic role, and in semantic role labeling the flowers are often labeled as Patient/Theme rather than Direct Object. The distinction matters: syntactic Direct Object does not always map to the same semantic label as Patient in transfer events. 
Putting this together, the noun phrase 'the flowers' is best described as the entity that is affected by the event and undergoes the transfer of possession, i.e., the Patient (also known as Theme) in this transfer scenario. Therefore, the incorrect options fail to capture the correct semantic relationship because they either assign a role to the agent, the recipient, or rely on a syntactic label that does not reflect the semantic participation in the transfer. 
In short, recognizing that 'the flowers' are the item being given and thus undergo possession change helps distinguish the correct semantic role from the others, which correspond to other participants or to syntactic labels rather than the underlying event participants.

LIN 001Y A01-A12 SQ 2025 Semantics HW

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

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