Thematic Roles in Image Schemas: A Missing Link Between Mind and Language

Abstract

As early as 1968, Fillmore suggested that deep cases could be sets “of universal, presumably innate, concepts” human beings form to describe reality. Langacker’s (1991) role archetypes highlight the “primal status and nonlinguistic origin” of Thematic roles. I argue that Thematic roles have their “nonlinguistic” origin in image schemas and link the image schemas with language structures. The thesis is based on my description of the object schema (Szwedek, 2018), the definition of the image schema (Szwedek, 2019), and major works on Thematic roles. The object schema is fundamental in that all physical objects are experienceable by the senses (Szwedek, 2011, 2018). In contrast to relational schemas, it is also conceptually independent, while “[r]elations are conceptually dependent, i.e. one cannot conceptualize interconnections without conceptualizing the entities they interconnect” (Langacker, 1987). I posit that Thematic roles are a link between image schemas (mind) and language, constituting a stable scaffolding for various syntactic structures.