Rolesverbs

Rolesverbs is a term in linguistic theory used to describe a class of verbs whose core meaning centers on the assignment and realization of participant roles in an event. In this view, a rolesverb denotes an event type while simultaneously encoding the relationships among participants—such as agent, patient, recipient, benefactive, or experiencer—through its argument structure. The semantic contribution of a rolesverb is closely tied to how many arguments it requires and which roles those arguments realize.

In terms of morphology and syntax, rolesverbs often participate in valency-changing operations that realign or add arguments to reflect role assignments. They may trigger or require specific case marking, voice, or applicative constructions that promote a beneficiary or goal argument. Some languages show systematic alternations where a active form licenses certain roles for the direct object, while a corresponding voice or applicative form highlights other roles for additional arguments. In other languages, roles are conveyed through syntactic position rather than morphology, with the verb’s semantics constraining which participants can appear in which slots.

Cross-linguistically, rolesverbs tend to be associated with transitivity and causation patterns that foreground recipient, beneficiary, or goal roles, and with interactions between verb meaning and argument structure. The category remains a theoretical label used to compare how languages encode participant roles on the verb rather than in the surrounding clause. Concrete examples depend on language-specific inventories, and the notion is primarily used in typological and theoretical discussions of argument structure.

Research on rolesverbs is not yet standardized, and debates continue regarding its boundaries, criteria, and cross-language applicability. Further cross-linguistic and corpus-based work is needed to clarify its stability as a linguistic category.