Argument Realization

Levin, Beth; Hovav, Malka Rappaport

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511610479

Cited by 617 publications

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“…Transitives are also used to describe contact (the lamp touches the table), perception (the girl sees the lion), spatial relations (the wall surrounds the castle), and motion (the tiger enters the room), all of which lack cause predicates in argument structure theories (cf. Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 2005). When we look across languages, however, the picture is clearer: events of direct external causation are consistently described with transitives, whereas the encoding of noncausal events is more variable.…”

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confidence: 99%

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“…Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 2005 for a review), the organized dimensions of meaning that influence how verbs will appear in sentences. These correspondences raise several questions about how event representations and linguistic forms interact during development.…”

Section: Linking Language and Events: Spatiotemporal Cues Drive Childmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When we look across languages, however, the picture is clearer: events of direct external causation are consistently described with transitives, whereas the encoding of noncausal events is more variable. For instance, the Russian translations of sentences like 'The supervisor manages the department' are not transitive sentences but instead have oblique arguments (roughly, 'The supervisor manages over the department'; Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 2005). This connection between cause and transitivity influences the behavior of adult English speakers, despite the looseness with which English uses transitive syntax.…”

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“…This parallels the effect in causal perception: the number of billiard balls in a display does not provide strong evidence on its own that the event is causal. However, both within and across languages (Haspelmath, 1993;Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 2005), causal events are more likely than noncausal events to be described in a transitive sentence (3) rather than a sentence like (4), where an intransitive verb appears with a prepositional phrase.(3) John broke the vase.(4) John talked to Bill.English learners face a challenge, though, because the connection between transitivity and cause is in actuality fairly weak. Transitives are also used to describe contact (the lamp touches the English speakers are asked to guess the meanings of novel transitive verbs, they interpret them as causal verbs, inferring that the subject exerted force and caused something to move or change, while the object underwent some change of state (Kako, 2006).…”

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Linking Language and Events: Spatiotemporal Cues Drive Children’s Expectations About the Meanings of Novel Transitive Verbs

Kline

Snedeker

Schulz

2016

Language Learning and Development

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How do children map linguistic representations onto the conceptual structures that they encode? In the present studies, we provided 3-4 year old children with minimal-pair scene contrasts in order to determine the effect of particular event properties on novel verblearning. Specifically, we tested whether spatiotemporal cues to causation also inform children's interpretation of transitive verbs either with or without the causal/inchoative alternation (She broke the lamp/the lamp broke). In Experiment 1, we examined spatiotemporal continuity. Children saw scenes with puppets that approached a toy in a distinctive manner, and toys that lit up or played a sound. In the causal events, the puppet contacted the object, and activation was immediate. In the noncausal events, the puppet stopped short before reaching the object, and the effect occurred after a short pause (apparently spontaneously). Children expected novel verbs used in the inchoative transitive/intransitive alternation to refer to spatiotemporally intact causal interactions rather than to 'gap' control scenes. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the temporal order of sub-events, holding spatial relationships constant, and provided evidence for only one verb frame (either transitive or intransitive). Children mapped transitive verbs to scenes where the agent's action closely preceded the activation of the toy over scenes in which the timing of the two events was switched, but did not do so when they heard an intransitive construction. These studies reveal that children's expectations about transitive verbs are at least partly driven by their nonlinguistic understanding of causal events: children expect transitive syntax to refer to scenes where the agent's action is a plausible cause of the outcome. These findings open a wide avenue for exploration into the relationship between children's linguistic knowledge and their nonlinguistic understanding of events. During their first years of life, children develop rich and robust cognitive models of the world around them. They represent the differences between people and objects, make predictions about physical and social events, and learn complex patterns of causal information ( Baker, Saxe, & Tenenbaum, 2011;Luo, Kaufman, & Baillargeon, 2009;Sobel, Tenenbaum, & Gopnik, 2004;Spelke, 1990;Woodward, 1998). At the same time, they learn the structure and content of at least one language, acquiring representations that allow them to understand the speech around them and produce novel sentences of their own. LINKING LANGUAGE AND EVENTSRelatively little is known about how children map these linguistic representations onto the conceptual structures that they encode.A central property of human language is that there are systematic correspondences between the form of sentence (syntax) and its meaning (semantics) (Baker, 1988;Brown, 1958;Fillmore, 1968;Montague, 1970;Pinker, 1984). For instance, although there are no familiar content words in the sentence The blicket daxed the wug to the blorg, adults can infer that t...

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Linking Language and Events: Spatiotemporal Cues Drive Children’s Expectations About the Meanings of Novel Transitive Verbs

Kline

Snedeker

Schulz

2016

Language Learning and Development

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Structure of the Verb Phrase

Mateu

2012

The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics

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TheSpray/LoadAlternation

Beavers

2017

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition

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In the English spray/load diathesis alternation (also sometimes known as the “locative alternation”) causative verbs with meanings in which some locatum is moved into or onto some location allow either non‐causer argument to be realized as the object, with the other argument realized as an oblique (e.g., John sprayed the paint on the wall vs. John sprayed the wall with the paint ). For several decades this alternation has been a significant, cross‐linguistically attested phenomenon that has served as a major testing ground for theories of the nature of argument realization and the relationship of syntax to lexical semantics. This chapter offers a comprehensive empirical overview of the phenomenon, focusing on the variable realization of the non‐subject arguments of verbs that show the alternation, the corresponding semantics whereby whichever argument of the verb is the object receives a “holistic” interpretation, and the connection to related alternations in English and other languages. Various analyses are discussed that have used this alternation to argue for particular views of the syntax of argument realization and the syntax–lexical semantics link, including purely syntactic alternations that take the derivation to be transformational in nature, and approaches that have argued for particular views of the nature of lexical meanings and the mapping to syntax, including traditional thematic role, event structural, lexical aspectual, and lexical entailment‐based approaches. Theories that have argued that the relevant aspects of lexical meaning are encoded syntactically rather than lexically are also discussed, as are theories that have looked at the more fine‐grained microvariation in which verbs show the alternation and why. The ultimate conclusion is that lexical variation in which verbs show the alternation and their properties when they do is one of the largest unanswered questions regarding this phenomenon and will require more detailed work on how lexical idiosyncrasy figures into argument realization.

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Argument Realization

Cited by 617 publications

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Linking Language and Events: Spatiotemporal Cues Drive Children’s Expectations About the Meanings of Novel Transitive Verbs

Linking Language and Events: Spatiotemporal Cues Drive Children’s Expectations About the Meanings of Novel Transitive Verbs

Structure of the Verb Phrase

TheSpray/LoadAlternation

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