ABSTRACT
Linguistics.—The term thematic relation refers to the connection between a verbal predicate and each of its arguments (or actants, in Lucien Tesnière’s terminology). Each actant assumes a specific role in the predication. Apart from the particular usage of the term actant in Algirdas-Julien Greimas’s semiotics (→SEMIOTICS), Tesnière’s theory (presented in his book on structural syntax), whose principal assumptions will be presented here, laid the foundation for several lines of research in linguistics and cognitive science.
