On the Predicate-Argument Structure: Internal and Absorbing Scope

Valency filling is considered a major mechanism for constructing the semantic structure of the sentence from semantic structures of words. This approach requires a broader view of valency and actant, covering all kinds of actant-bearing words and all types of valency filling. We introduce the concept of scope as a generalization of actant: it is any fragment of a Syntactic (SyntScope) or Semantic Structure (SemScope) that fills a valency of a predicate. Actant is a particular case of scope. We discuss two classes of situations, mostly on the material of Russian, that manifest nonisomorphism between SyntScope and SemScope: (a) meaning α that fills a valency of word L constitutes only a part of the meaning of word L′ (internal scope); (b) predicate π is an internal component of the meaning of word L; π extends its valency (distinct from valencies of L) to words different from L (absorbing scope).