Using instruments to understand argument structure: Evidence for gradient representation

Abstract

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.

The Developmental Origins of Syntactic Bootstrapping

“…Distributional criteria based on this intuition can be used to automatically classify phrases as arguments or adjuncts (e.g., Merlo & Ferrer, ). Linking the distinction between arguments and adjuncts to verb‐bias learning in this way is consistent with evidence that argument status is gradient rather than categorical (Rissman, Rawlins, & Landau, ).…”

Effects of Case and Transitivity on Processing Dependencies: Evidence From Niuean

“…This strategy, however, does not explain the full pattern of results, because it does not extend to the contrast we observe between obligatory and non‐obligatory oblique objects (i.e., the effect of transitivity). Interestingly, processing differences between obligatory and non‐obligatory arguments have been widely demonstrated in environments that do not involve long‐distance dependencies; specifically, in the processing of arguments (obligatory elements) versus adjuncts (non‐obligatory elements) (e.g., Boland, ; Clifton, Speer & Abney, ; Liversedge, Pickering, Branigan, & van Gompel, ; Rissman, Rawlins & Landau, ; Schutze & Gibson, ). It is possible that the effects of case and transitivity indeed arise from two separate processing strategies.…”

The acquisition of event nominals and light verb constructions

“…For instance, the correspondence between subjects and agents only seems to hold in what Keenan () calls “basic sentences” (e.g., active sentences are basic; passives are not). For another instance, instruments are critical participants in many events (e.g., knives in slicing events) yet are not reliably expressed as syntactic arguments (e.g., Rissman, Rawlins, & Landau, ; also see He, Wellwood, Lidz, & Williams, ; Wellwood, He, Lidz, & Williams, for discussion on event participant conceptualization). Since children heavily rely on syntax–semantics mappings in early word learning, as discussed in Section 2, cases where the mappings are disrupted would presumably pose a challenge.…”