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There is no one-to-one correspondence between semantic roles and grammatical relations. Based on the concept of implicational hierarchy, some linguists have attempted to identify the relationship between grammatical relations and thematic roles. In this descriptive research, based on the Persian Proposition bank, Semantic Role Corpus in the Persian Language, and Persian Syntactic Dependency Treebank, the semantic hierarchy for different grammatical relations like subject, direct object, indirect object, subject complement and object complement have been explored in the one hand and also the grammatical hierarchy for different thematic roles like agent, experiencer, cause, theme, stimulus, attribute have been considered on the other hand. The syntactic and semantic corpora above consist of approximately 30,000 sentences and about half a million tokens. Observations showed that in the Persian language, among different kinds of semantic roles, the first candidate to be the subject is the agent followed by the theme, experiencer and cause. For the object position, the theme outranks the result which in turn outranks the topic and the recipient. In the direct object position, the most frequent role is the location followed by theme, recipient and destination; and finally, in the subject and object complement position, the attribute is the most frequent role among the other thematic roles in the sentences. On the grammatical hierarchy for thematic roles, subject outranks the object, as the agent and the experiencer; subject outranks the adjunct as the cause; triple preposition outranks the subject as the stimulus; object outranks the subject as the theme, and finally, the subject complement outranks the subject complement as the attribute. Apart from this dominant tendency, this research showed that there are other remarkable correlations between syntactic and semantic arguments; for example, the agent in addition to subject position can be placed in the direct object, indirect object, and even in the adjunct position. The appearance of experiencer in object position and stimulus in subject position is the other remarkable result.

1. Introduction
Grammatical relations do not necessarily correspond to the specific semantic roles. For example, although the subject usually tends to be agent, data-driven studies show that the other thematic roles like theme, experiencer or cause tend to be in the subject position too. In this study, we sought to answer these two questions; what the relationship between the hierarchy of semantic roles and grammatical relations is? And what the thematic and grammatical hierarchies in the Persian language are? This study hypothesizes that Persian native speakers usually place agent, patient, recipient, and attribute respectively into the subject, object, prepositional object, object complement, and subject complement position.
 
2. Literature Review
Based on the concept of grammatical hierarchy, Fillmore (1968), Jackandoff (1972), Comrie (1981), Givon (1984), Kroft (1990), Dowty 1991, Saeed (2003), and some other linguists have shown the relationship between semantic roles and grammatical relations in different ways. Fillmore (1968) states that not all semantic roles appear equally in the subject position. It seems that there is a tendency for the actor to be the subject than the instrument. Among the instrument and the receptive, the instrument more likely appears in the subject position. Saeed (2003: 155) constructs the subject hierarchy as below:
AGENT>RECIPIENT/BENEFACTIVE>THEME/PATIENT>INSTRUMENT>LOCATION
In the Persian language, some studies have separately concentrated on semantic roles, grammatical relations, or grammatical hierarchies. For example, Farrokhi Rad (2007), Mirzaei & Moloodi (2014), and Alizadeh & Rezghi (2015) have studied thematic roles in the Persian language. Bahrami (2014) and Bahrami (2017) have explored the animacy hierarchy and definiteness hierarchy. Gholipour (2018) has studied some thematic roles in identical syntactic valency structures of Persian verbs.
3. Methodology
To achieve the hierarchy of grammatical relations and semantic roles in Persian language and to examine the hypotheses of this research, we used the Persian proposition Bank (Mirzaei & Moloodi: 2016), Semantic Role Corpus in Persian Language (Mirzaei and Moloudi, 2015), and Persian syntactic dependency treebank (Rasooli et al., 2013). These corpora, which have the same content, consist of approximately 30,000 sentences. The two first were annotated whit the predicate-argument information and the third with syntactic annotations in addition to morpho-syntactic features.
In the present study, in order to investigate the correspondences between the semantic roles of the verbs and grammatical relations, at first, the semantic correlations of grammatical relations including subject, object, the prepositional object, subject complement, and object complement have been considered. Then the syntactic correlations of semantic roles including agent, experiencer, cause, theme, stimulus, and attribute have been explored.
 
4. Results
As shown in Table 1, findings indicated that among different semantic roles, the first candidate that tends to be the subject is the agent followed by the theme, experiencer and cause. For the object position, the theme outranks the result which in turn outranks the topic and the recipient. In the direct object position, the most frequent role is the location followed by theme, recipient and destination; and finally, in the subject and object complement position, the attribute is the most frequent role among the other thematic roles in the sentences.
 
Table 1
grammatical relations and equivalent semantic roles

	first thematic role & frequency	second thematic role & frequency	third thematic role & frequency	forth thematic role & frequency
Subject	agent 14440	theme 9985	experiencer 3145	cause 1409
Object	theme 1343	result 1093	topic 564	recipient 372
Prepositional object	location 1680	theme 1463	recipient 1084	destination 644
Subject complement	attribute 3875	the other roles < 100
Object complement	attribute 692	the other roles < 100

 
On the grammatical hierarchy for thematic roles, as shown in Table 2, the subject, object, adjunct, and prepositional object respectively tend to be the agent. This hierarchy is different for the cause, in that subject tends to be in the first position and then adjunct, triple preposition, and subject complement. For the experiencer, stimulus, theme and attribute, the grammatical hierarchy respectively is as below:
experiencer: subject> object> triple preposition> subject complement
stimulus: triple preposition> subject> complement clause> object
theme:         object > subject> triple preposition> complement clause
attribute: subject complement> object complement> subject> complement clause
 
Table 2
semantic roles and equivalent grammatical relations

agent	subject 14440	object 214	adjunct 221	prepositional object 62
cause	subject 1409	adjunct 99	* triple preposition 44	subject complement 27
experiencer	subject 3145	object 348	triple preposition 92	subject complement 29
stimulus	triple preposition 615	subject 218	complement clause 110	Object 63
theme	object 13430	subject 9985	triple preposition 6006	complement clause 3205
attribute	subject complement 3875	object complement 692	subject 152	complement clause 74

^* object complement, prepositional complement of noun and prepositional complement of adjective are introduced as the triple preposition.
 
5. Conclusion
According to Dowty 1991, the best theory for describing the argument selection will be one that involves just two roles named Proto-Agent and Proto-Patient. Proto-Agent includes agent, causer, experiencer as the roles that they have volitional involvement in the event or state, causes an event or change of state in another participant, moves relative to the position of another participant, internally causes the event or state.
The concept of Proto-Patient also includes that role which undergoes a change of state, is causally affected by another participant, is stationary relative to the movement of another participant, or is subject of an external cause
This study showed that the subject as a relational meaning in the Persian language is equal to the concept of  Proto-Agent as a thematic role. The object also is nearly equal to the concept of  Proto-Patient as a thematic role.
Additionally in this study, the semantic hierarchy for different grammatical relations like subject, direct object, indirect object, subject complement, and object complement have been explored on the one hand and also the syntactic hierarchy for different thematic roles like agent, experiencer, cause, theme, stimulus, attribute have been considered on the other hand.

Keywords: Implicational hierarchy, thematic hierarchy, agent, grammatical subject, Persian language

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