Semantic relations (also referred to as semantic roles) exist between non-head dependent units and the head, and they are concerned with properties that are inherent in the linguistic units and that are associated with the grammatical structure of a language. For instance, between the head verb and the arguments or dependents it takes, there are semantic roles like Agent, Patient, or Instruments; and between modifiers and the head noun (if the head noun represents a concrete object), the roles of the modifiers to the head noun can be ‘color, size, material’ (as in ‘a big white stone house’), etc. Semantic relations are determined by the structure between the head word and its dependents, so they are structure internal or head-oriented. Semantic relations are independent of context and use, and they represent consistent common recognition of the objective world by the whole language community, so they are constant and relatively stable in any context (Lu, 1998).
[1] Loar, J. K. (2011). Chinese syntactic grammar: functional and conceptual principles. New York: Peter Lang.
