Semantic banks (e.g., PropBank (Palmer et al., 2005)) often represent arguments as syntactic constituents or, more generally, text spans (Baker  et al., 1998).
coNLL-2008 and shared tasks (Surdeanu et al., 2008;Hajic et al., 2009) popularized dependency-based semantic role labeling where the goal is to identify syntactic heads of arguments rather than entire constituents.