On the possibility of distinguighing between complements and adjuncts

Vater, Heinz

doi:10.1075/slcs.1.05vat

Cited by 20 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…Despite the alignment between syntactic and semantic diagnostics for these prototypical cases, argument diagnostics function more as guidelines than deterministic rules for identifying a verb’s arguments (Vater, 1978; Croft, 2001; Dowty, 2003). The behavior of instruments demonstrates a case where multiple argument diagnostics do not align.…”

Section: 2 the Problematic Case Of Instrumentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite the importance of argument structure, however, there is little consensus on how to determine when a phrase is an argument rather than a modifier of a verb (Vater, 1978; Dowty, 1982; Schutze, 1995; Croft, 2001; Dowty, 2003; Koenig, Mauner, & Bienvenue, 2003; Conklin, Koenig, & Mauner, 2004). Perhaps the most fundamental assumption is that arguments correspond to the “event participants” that are specified by the verb.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Using instruments to understand argument structure: Evidence for gradient representation

2015

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The arguments of a verb are commonly assumed to correspond to the event participants specified by the verb. That is, drink has two arguments because drink specifies two participants: someone who drinks and something that gets drunk. This correspondence does not appear to hold, however, in the case of instrumental participants, e.g. John drank the soda with a straw. Verbs such as slice and write have been argued to specify an instrumental participant, even though instruments do not pattern like arguments given other criteria. In this paper, we investigated how instrumental verbs are represented, testing the hypothesis that verbs such as slice encode three participants in the same way that dative verbs such as lend encode three participants. In two experiments English-speakers reported their judgments about the number of participants specified by a verb, e.g. that drink specifies two participants. These judgments indicate that slice does not encode three distinct arguments. Nonetheless, some verbs were systematically more likely to elicit the judgment that the instrument is specified by the verb, a pattern that held across individual subjects. To account for these findings, we propose that instruments are not independent verbal arguments but are represented in a gradient away: an instrument may be a more or less salient part of the force exerted by an agent. These results inform our understanding of the relationship between argument structure and event representation, raising questions concerning the role of arguments in language processing and learning.

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Section: 2 the Problematic Case Of Instrumentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Using instruments to understand argument structure: Evidence for gradient representation

2015

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“…As discussed in Vater (1978aVater ( , 1978b, a coherent view is already absent in Tesnière (1959Tesnière ( , 2015, the founding work on valency. Perhaps surprisingly, after 60 years of intensive research on this topic, we do not seem to be any closer to a clear understanding of this purported dichotomy.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the argument-adjunct distinction in the Polish “Semantic Syntax” tradition

Przepiórkowski

2017

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On the argument-adjunct distinction in the Polish Semantic Syntax traditionThe aim of this paper is to examine the understanding of the Argument-Adjunct Distinction within the Polish Semantic Syntax (SS) tradition, associated with the name of Stanisław Karolak and presented in the nominally syntactic volume of the Grammar of contemporary Polish (Pol. Gramatyka współczesnego języka polskiego; Topolińska, 1984), especially in Karolak (1984) and Grochowski (1984), as well as in later work. Section 1 reviews the three approaches to determining the number and kind of arguments of a given predicate, as discussed in Karolak (1984), concentrating on the one that is endorsed there. Then, Sections 2–3 show that the key notions used in this approach have not been – and probably cannot be – made operational. Moreover, Section 4 briefly reviews some more recent Semantic Syntax work and shows that this lack of operational AAD in Karolak (1984) extends to the SS programme at large. Finally, Section 5 concludes that this deficiency, while common in linguistic theories, is particularly troublesome in the case of SS, which is founded on the notion of predicate-argument structure. O rozróżnieniu argumentów od modyfikatorów w polskiej tradycji „składni semantycznej”Artykuł poświęcony jest kwestii fundamentalnej dla szkoły „składni semantycznej” (kojarzonej przede wszystkim z nazwiskiem Stanisława Karolaka), a mianowicie kwestii odróżniania argumentów od modyfikatorów. Celem artykułu jest wykazanie, że w tradycji „składni semantycznej” nie została zaproponowana operacyjna procedura odróżnienia argumentów od modyfikatorów, choć istnienie takiej procedury wydaje się warunkiem koniecznym dla wyodrębnienia struktury predykatowo-argumentowej, głównego celu wielu prac zakorzenionych w tej tradycji.

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“…These have variously been called 'peripheral' (Longacre, 1976: 35), 'modal' (Cook, 1972a: 42), Outer circumstantial' (Halliday, 1970: 149), or 'free' (Panevova, 1974;Vater, 1978). They may in principle accompany any predicate, but their presence or absence is not in general crucial to determining the acceptability of any given case frame.…”

Section: Optional Casesmentioning

confidence: 95%

The use of verb features in arriving at a ‘meaning representation’

Somers¹

1982

Linguistics

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The paper is principally concerned with the use of 'verb features' like those of Chafe in the computation of meaning representations for individual sentences.The paper briefly describes the computer program PTOSYS, which performs this task, but is concerned chiefly with a discussion of the theoretical linguistic background. Chafe's verb features and Cook's 'case frame matrix' are discussed at length. It is shown that Chafe's notions are useful for the 'shallow semantics' approach of PTOSYS, but that there may be some conflict between 'verb features' and 'modality features'. A brief comparison of Chafe j Cook features and VendlerjDowty verb categories is attempted.*

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On the possibility of distinguighing between complements and adjuncts

Cited by 20 publications

References 0 publications

Using instruments to understand argument structure: Evidence for gradient representation

Using instruments to understand argument structure: Evidence for gradient representation

On the argument-adjunct distinction in the Polish “Semantic Syntax” tradition

The use of verb features in arriving at a ‘meaning representation’

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