Experiencer As A Semantic Role

Overview

The Experiencer is a fundamental semantic role that denotes the entity undergoing a mental state, perception, or emotion. It is the participant that feels, sees, hears, knows, or believes something.

Key Concepts

Key aspects of the Experiencer role include:

• The Experiencer: The entity experiencing the state.
• The Stimulus: The event or entity causing the experience.
• Verb Type: Often associated with verbs of cognition, perception, and emotion.

Deep Dive

The Experiencer is distinct from the Agent, as it doesn’t typically initiate an action but rather undergoes a state. For example, in “John fears the dark,” John is the Experiencer, and “the dark” is the Stimulus.

Consider the sentence:

Mary saw the bird.

Here, Mary is the Experiencer of perception, and “the bird” is the Stimulus.

Applications

Understanding the Experiencer role is vital for:

• Natural Language Processing (NLP) for semantic parsing.
• Machine translation to correctly map sentence structures.
• Linguistic analysis of sentence meaning.
• Computational linguistics research.

Challenges & Misconceptions

A common challenge is distinguishing the Experiencer from the Agent, especially with verbs that can have both interpretations. Some theories debate whether the Experiencer is always a sentient being.

FAQs

What is the difference between Experiencer and Agent?

An Agent actively initiates an action, while an Experiencer passively undergoes a mental or emotional state.

Are all Experiencers sentient?

Typically, yes, but linguistic theories vary on this point.