Introducing Arguments

This article aims at focusing on a set of phenomena related to the syntax and semantics of bare count nominals. We will show that bare count nominals unmarked for number (BNs) can occur both in object argument position and in predicate position, and can form denominal verbs. This is because, in syntax, BNs can only occur as internal arguments of relational categories (V, P) to which bare nouns can move and conflate at some point during the syntactic derivation (Hale & Keyser, Prolegomenon to a theory of argument structure, MIT Press, 2002). On the other hand, BNs – being property denoting expressions – can neither occur as internal arguments of unaccusative and complex transitive verbs nor as external arguments due to a structural constraint on subjects / specifiers (Kallulli, The comparative syntax of Albanian. On the contribution of syntactic types to propositional interpretation, University of Durham dissertation, 1999): they must be properly licensed by appropriate functional categories. The novelty of this article is to relate the occurrence of bare nominals with the argument structure position in which they may occur at a syntactic level of representation, and to explain the relationship between argument structure and the interpretation of bare nominals.

This study investigated the formulation of verb argument structure in Catalan- and Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing age-matched controls. We compared how language production can be guided by conceptual factors, such as the organization of the entities participating in an event and knowledge regarding argument structure. Eleven children with SLI (aged 3;8 to 6;6) and eleven control children participated in an eye-tracking experiment in which participants had to describe events with different argument structure in the presence of visual scenes. Picture descriptions, latency time and eye movements were recorded and analyzed. The picture description results showed that the percentage of responses in which children with SLI substituted a non-target verb for the target verb was significantly different from that for the control group. Children with SLI made more omissions of obligatory arguments, especially of themes, as the verb argument complexity increased. Moreover, when the number of arguments of the verb increased, the children took more time to begin their descriptions, but no differences between groups were found. For verb type latency, all children were significantly faster to start describing one-argument events than two- and three-argument events. No differences in latency time were found between two- and three-argument events. There were no significant differences between the groups. Eye-movement showed that children with SLI looked less at the event zone than the age-matched controls during the first two seconds. These differences between the groups were significant for three-argument verbs, and only marginally significant for one- and two-argument verbs. Children with SLI also spent significantly less time looking at the theme zones than their age-matched controls. We suggest that both processing limitations and deficits in the semantic representation of verbs may play a role in these difficulties.

Background : Some individuals with agrammatic aphasia have difficulty producing verbs when naming and generating sentences (Miceli, Silveri, Villa, & Caramazza, 1984; Saffran, Schwartz, & Marin, 1980; Zingeser & Berndt, 1990). And when verbs are produced there is an over-reliance on verbs requiring simple argument structure arrangements (Thompson, Lange, Schneider, & Shapiro, 1997; Thompson, Shapiro, Schneider, & Tait, 1994). Verbs, as argument-taking elements, show especially complex semantic and argument structure properties. This study investigated the role these properties have on verb production in individuals with agrammatic aphasia. Aim : This treatment study examined the extent to which semantic class and argument structure properties of verbs influenced the ability of seven individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia to retrieve verbs and then use them in correct sentence production. Verbs from two semantic classes and two argument structure categories were trained using either a semantic or an argument structure verb retrieval treatment. Specifically, acquisition and generalisation to trained and untrained verbs within and across semantic and argument structure categories was examined. In addition, the influence of verb production on each participant's sentence production was also examined. Methods & Procedures : Utilising a single-subject crossover design in combination with a multiple baseline design across subjects and behaviours, seven individuals with agrammatic aphasia were trained to retrieve verbs with specific argument structures from two semantic classes under two treatment conditions--semantic verb retrieval treatment and verb argument structure retrieval treatment. Treatment was provided on two-place and three-place motion or change of state verbs, counterbalanced across subjects and behaviours. A total of 102 verbs, depicted in black and white drawings, were utilised in the study, divided equally into motion and change of state verbs (semantic classes) and one-place, two-place, and three-place verbs (argument structure arrangements). Verbs were controlled for syllable length, picturability, phonological complexity, and frequency. These same stimulus items were used to elicit the sentence production probe. Outcomes & Results : Both treatments revealed significant effects in facilitating acquisition of verb retrieval in all participants. Minimal within and across verb category generalisation occurred. However, it was found that as retrieval of verbs improved, grammatical sentence production improved. This occurred without direct treatment on sentence, production.

This study focuses on the description of argument structure and word order in Saudi Sign language (SSL). The nature of the syntactic level of the grammar of SSL is clarified. Since word order is often considered the most important part of grammar, this study details the various options that are available for the major constituents (Subject, Verb, and Object) in SSL independent of any connection to spoken Arabic syntax. In SSL, like in other languages, the nature of the arguments (Subject, Object) and the kind of verb can impact the word order. To investigate word order in SSL, which is based on Chomsky’s (1995) Minimalist Program (MP), data were collected through derivation of data from narratives (semi-naturalistic-corpus) and an experiment (picture-description task). This research involved a sample of 10 deaf signing participants who are all fluent in SSL. All the participants have lived in Saudi Arabia for at least 10 years. Results indicate that the SSL is as any natural language and from the spoken language in Saudi Arabia. The most common word order in declaratives and the basic constituent order in SSL is SVO. As in virtually all sign languages, Wh-elements in SSL occur at the end of the clause. According to research on the interaction between word order and grammatical use of facial expressions and head locations (nonmanual marking), nonmanual markings have pragmatic purposes and may have syntactic functions.

Discussions of the suffix -ik/-ek, which attaches to the ciCewa verb stem, have generally focused on its valence-reducing properties (Mchombo, 1993, 2004; Dubinsky & Simango, 1996; Seidl & Dimitriadis, 2003). The affix, known as the stative, typically attaches to transitive verbs and has the effect of eliminating the underlying subject from the verb's argument structure and promoting the underlying object of the verb to the subject grammatical function. This article describes a less common variant of the suffix -ik/-ek in ciCewa which (i) typically attaches to intransitive verbs, and (ii) has the effect of increasing the verb's valence by one argument. This affix introduces an agentive argument into the verb's argument structure. It is argued that this transitive affix is a variant of the causative morpheme.

Our daily verbal communication – official, formal, informal, about general, professional, or private topics – represents our subjective opinions that mostly include reasoning and arguments which we use in order to prove our point. The linguistic realisation (verbalisation) of our personal position always requires the use of extraordinary syntactic-pragmatic structural elements, such as arguments that add credibility to the statement. The study of argumentative structures allows us to identify the linguistic cues that turn a regular expression into an argumentative statement. Understanding those cues in a particular language helps the speakers improve their communication skills.Researching argumentative structures in the context of natural language processing has become a very active process over the past few years. One of the main focuses is on the computational processing of argumentative texts, which significantly increases the feasibility of automatic processing and the semantic analysis of large volumes of text data. This paper aims to describe and reveal argumentation structures in the spoken Georgian language. The research data comes from a sub-corpus of the Georgian National Corpus, the Georgian Political Text Corpus. The database is thematically diverse and contains politicians’ speeches and TV debates, specifically:● public speeches of the Presidents of Georgia and other politicians (Zviad Gamsaxurdia, Eduard Shevardnadze, Mikheil Saakashvili, Noe Jordania, Giorgi Kvirikashvili, Shalva Natelashvili)● recordings of Parliament and TV debates (Parliament sessions, political TV shows).The corpus of political texts not only contains thematically diverse materials but is also quite representative from a quantitative point of view: This article analyses the constituent parts of an argumentative text such as premises and reasoning and their connections, with the aim to generally characterise the argumentative structures in Georgian on the basis of Janier and Saint-Disier 2019.1) Arguments based on analogy:Premise 1: Case C1 is similar to case C2.Premise 2: A is true (false) in case C1.Conclusion: A is true (false) in case C2. 2) Arguments based on negative consequences:Premise 1: If an action leads to bad consequences, everything else being equal, it should not be exerted.Premise 2: If action A is exerted, bad consequences will occur.Conclusion: A should not be exerted.3) Arguments based on expert opinions:Premise 1: E is a reliable authority in the domain S.Premise 2: A is a proposition contained in S.Premise 3: E asserts that A.Conclusion: A is true.4) Arguments based on examples:Premise 1: Example 1 is an example that supports claim P.Premise 2: Example n is an example that supports claim P.Conclusion: Claim P is true.5) Arguments based on positions to know:Premise 1: Source A is in a position to know something about domain S which contains proposition P.Premise 2: A asserts that P (in domain S) is true (false),Conclusion: P is true (false)6) Arguments based on popular opinions:Premise 1: Everybody does X.Premise 2: X is a good thing to do.Conclusion: X must be the right thing to do.7) Arguments based on causes and effects:Premise 1: Doing X will cause Y to occur, or if X occurs then Y will occur.Premise 2: X is done, or X occurs.Conclusion: Y will occur

This study is an investigation of the patterns and strength of the connections between English dative verbs and the double object dative (DOD) argument structure in native speaker production. The subjects completed three written production tasks using dative and other verbs from different semantic classes of verbs. The results show that alternating dative verbs varied in their patterns of connection to argument structures, but were consistent in the strength of their connection to the DOD argument structure across subjects and tasks. There was no support for production differences due to verb class membership, but the results do support a model of lexical representation that represents variable strengths of association between individual verbs and argument structures. With respect to the design of production and processing studies, the results do not support the treatment of alternating dative verbs as a unitary group, nor a priori assumptions about relative argument structure complexity between alternating and nonalternating verbs, but do support the use of production tasks to determine individual verb argument structure preferences.

Text discourse parsing weighs importantly in understanding information flow and argumentative structure in natural language, making it beneficial for downstream tasks. While previous work significantly improves the performance of RST discourse parsing, they are not readily applicable to practical use cases: (1) EDU segmentation is not integrated into most existing tree parsing frameworks, thus it is not straightforward to apply such models on newly-coming data. (2) Most parsers cannot be used in multilingual scenarios, because they are developed only in English. (3) Parsers trained from single-domain treebanks do not generalize well on out-of-domain inputs. In this work, we propose a document-level multilingual RST discourse parsing framework, which conducts EDU segmentation and discourse tree parsing jointly. Moreover, we propose a cross-translation augmentation strategy to enable the framework to support multilingual parsing and improve its domain generality. Experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on document-level multilingual RST parsing in all sub-tasks.

Unaccusative verb production in agrammatic aphasia: the argument structure complexity hypothesis

This paper provides an analysis of Italian complex predicates formed by combining a feminine nominalization in -ataand one of three light verbs:fare‘make’,dare‘give’ andprendere‘take’. We show that the constraints governing the choice of light verb follow from a syntactic approach to argument structure, and that several interpretive differences between complex and simplex predicates formed from the same verb root can be accounted for in a compositional, bottom–up approach. These differences include variation in creation vs. affected interpretations of Theme objects, implications concerning the size of the event described, the (un)availability of a passive alternant, and the agentivity or lack thereof of the subject argument.

Cross-linguistic Variation in Differential Subject Marking.- Differential Subject Marking at Argument Structure, Syntax, and PF.- Quantitative Variation in Korean Case Ellipsis: Implications for Case Theory.- Ergative Case-marking in Hindi.- DOM and Two Types of DSM in Turkish.- Differential Subject Marking in Polish: The Case of Genitive vs. Nominative Subjects in "X was not at Y"-constructions.- Differential Argument Marking in Two-term Case Systems and its Implications for the General Theory of Case Marking.- Non-canonical Agent Marking in Agul.- From Topic to Subject Marking: Implications for a Typology of Subject Marking.- Grammaticalization and Strategies in Resolving Subject Marking Paradoxes: The Case of Tsimshianic.- Different Subjects, Different Marking.- Differential Marking of Intransitive Subjects in Kambera (Austronesian).

The main purpose of this paper is to show that argument structure constructions like complex telic path of motion constructions (John walked to the store) or complex resultative constructions (The dog barked the chickens awake) are not to be regarded as "theoretical entities" (Jackendoff (1997b); Goldberg (1995)). As an alternative to these semanticocentric accounts, I argue that their epiphenomenal status can be shown iff we take into account some important insights from three syntactically-oriented works: (i) Hoekstra's (1988, 1992) analysis of S<mall>C<lause> R<esults>, (ii) Hale & Keyser's (1993f.) configurational theory of argument structure, and (iii) Mateu & Rigau’s (1999; i.p.) syntactic account of Talmy's (1991) typological distinction between 'satellite framed languages' (e.g., English, German, Dutch, etc.) and 'verb-framed languages' (e.g., Catalan, Spanish, French, etc.). In particular, it is argued that the formation of the abovementioned constructions involves a conflation process of two different syntactic argument structures, this process being carried out via a 'generalized transformation'. Accordingly, the so-called 'lexical subordination process' (Levin & Rapoport (1988)) is argued to involve a syntactic operation, rather than a semantic one. Due to our assuming that the parametric variation involved in the constructions under study cannot be explained in purely semantic terms (Mateu & Rigau (1999)), Talmy's (1991) typological distinction is argued to be better stated in lexical syntactic terms.

This chapter focuses on argument structure and its relation to syntax, particularly concentrating on the role of argument structure in determining the syntactic functions of the semantic arguments of a predicate. It explores some influential theories of argument structure and its representation in Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). The chapter also examines some proposed constraints on the relation between argument structure and syntax. It focuses on the theory of argument structure and its role in mapping between argument roles and grammatical functions. A primary focus of LFG theory since its inception has been the characterization of grammatical function alternations and the relation between different syntactic realizations of a predicate and its arguments. In more recent work, grammatical function alternations have been the focus of mapping or linking theory, a theory of the mapping between thematic roles and grammatical functions. The chapter discusses some of the more influential views of mapping theory.

This article explores the properties of unaccusatives in spoken Sudanese Arabic within the minimalist program. The overall aim is to testify the Unaccusative Hypothesis, in particular, the thematic and argument structure, locative inversion, there-insertion and passivization against the data from Sudanese Arabic. Grammatical judgment questionnaires were given to 10 native Sudanese speakers to test their intuition about unaccusatives. Parallel to the available literature, unaccusatives in Sudanese Arabic are defined by their semantic properties reflected syntactically in their thematic and argument structure. Unaccusatives can appear in locative inversion construction and in thereinsertion structures but cannot undergo passivization. This class of predicates takes a single argument, assigning the thematic role as Theme. Structurally, the single argument of unaccusative verbs moves from its canonical object position within VP to non-canonical surface subject position in [Spec, TP], making the structural derivation of unaccusative similar to that of passives, in that both lack external argument as well as both involve argument raising from lower position to higher position. The findings of this study manifest that languages of the world share some common properties even though they belong to different families. This in turn, provides rich information to comparative syntax, linguistic theories, and language typology.

This paper shows that the distribution of (non‑)finiteness in the South Slavic languages reflects an implicational scale along an independently attested semantic complementation hierarchy (e.g., Givón 1980). We suggest that in the South Slavic languages, finiteness is triggered by clausal agreement features associated with different syntactic heads. Building on a complexity approach to the complementation hierarchy, we propose that cross-linguistic variation in finiteness and variation across different types of complements are the result of language-specific differences in the distribution of agreement features. More broadly, we conclude that there is no (universal) semantic correlate of (non‑)finiteness and, contra cartographic approaches, that finiteness is not confined to a particular domain in the clause. Following Adger (2007), we argue that finiteness can be distributed over all clausal domains.