Punjabi belongs to the Indo-Aryan language family with canonical Subject-Object-Verb (S-O-V) word order. It has also believed to be a relatively free word order language like some of other Indo-Aryan languages (e.g Hindi/Urdu , Bangla , etc.). It is a general assumption that the native speaker generally prefers the canonical word order over the non-canonical word order. All the non-canonical word orderings are derived from canonical form through scrambling. Scrambling of constituents add some nuances to the meaning without changing the core semantics of the sentence.
Under this section, we will discuss the underlying order of indirect object (beneficiary/goal/location) and direct object (theme/patient) with the assumption that subject and verb
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In other words, the IO must precede the DO in the Punjabi ditransitive constructions, which confirms the canonical order (IO-DO) of two objects.
5.3.3.2. Thematic hierarchy
Thematic hierarchy is the technique to map semantic roles to syntactic functions. Fillmore (1968) formulates the very first hierarchy of “Cases” in order to select the subject of the clause. Levin (2005) defined thematic hierarchy in the following manner.
“Thematic Hierarchy: A language-independent ranking of possible semantic roles, which establishes prominence relations among them and is formulated because it figures in the statement of linguistic generalizations.”
Linguists (Grimshaw 1990, Speas 1990, Bresnan & Kanerva 1989, etc.) different opinions on the prominence of theta role in thematic hierarchy . However, one thing, which is important for the issue under discussion, is that most of them ranked the beneficiary, recipient/experience above the theme argument, whereas the ranked position of goal and location is varied in the different versions of thematic hierarchies formulated by various