Thematic role is a
linguistic
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
notion, which may refer to:
*
Theta role (in syntax or at the syntax-semantics interface), the formal device for representing syntactic argument structure—the number and type of noun phrases—required syntactically by a particular verb
*
Thematic relation
In certain theories of linguistics, thematic relations, also known as semantic roles or thematic roles, are the various roles that a noun phrase may play with respect to the action or state described by a governing verb, commonly the sentence's m ...
(in semantics), a term to express the role that a noun phrase plays with respect to the action or state described by a governing verb
However, it should not be confused with the use of ''thematic'' with reference to the
stem ("the theme") of an inflected word, as in
thematic vowel
In Indo-European studies, a thematic vowel or theme vowel is the vowel or from ablaut placed before the ending of a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs in the Indo-European languages with this vowel are thematic, and ...
.
{{disambiguation