Semantic Roles in Arabic with Reference to English

Abstract

Semantic role is a term used in syntax and semantics to refer to the semantic relations that link a predicate to its arguments in the description of a situation. Semantic role is the actual role a participant plays in some real or imagined situation, apart from the linguistic encoding of those situations. They also are referred to as "case frames" or "theta-grids". The term functional roles might also be used. These are also called ‘case roles’, ‘deep cases’.
The present study aims at studying  the semantic roles in both English and Arabic. It is an attempt to explain the similarities and differences concerning semantic roles as can as possibly  in both English and Arabic .
           This study starts with the semantic and syntactic analysis and the role of the verb in deciding the semantic role for the noun phrase. After that the historical and literature review of the semantic roles in both Arabic and English. In spite of the similarity in many aspects between Arabic and English with respect to semantic roles but Arabic is quite different from English in many point. I t also explains the criteria of identifying the semantic roles and showing the similarity and differences in both languages. The Arabic analyzed data are taken from “Bain  Al qasrain “ by Najieb Mahfodh .