Thematic relations

Thematic relations are like a game of pretend where we give roles to different words in a sentence. Imagine you and your friend are playing a pretend game where you are pretending to be at a pizza party. You might say:

"I am the chef and you are the customer. You order a pizza from me."

In this pretend game, "chef" and "customer" are different roles that we have given to ourselves.

In a sentence, we also give roles to different words to show how they relate to each other. For example, in the sentence "The cat chased the mouse," we give the role of the "chaser" to the cat and the role of the "chased" to the mouse. These roles are called "thematic relations."

There are different types of thematic relations. Some examples include "agent," which is the doer of the action (like the cat in our example), and "patient," which is the thing that is affected by the action (like the mouse in our example).

Thematic relations help us understand the meaning of a sentence and how the different words in it relate to each other.