Argument/oblique Alternations and the Structure of Lexical Meaning a Dissertation Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and the Committee on Graduate Studies of Stanford University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation examines the semantic underpinnings of argument realization. Much recent work in argument realization is based on some notion of “prominence preservation,” wherein the morphosyntactic prominence of an argument in the clause (e.g. its grammatical relation) supposedly reflects its prominence in the meaning of the clause. I explore prominence preservation as it applies to crosslinguistic data on argument/oblique alternations (e.g. locative and dative alternations). In argument/oblique alternations, a single argument can be realized as either a direct argument (subject/object) or an oblique. I show that these alternations exhibit a uniform semantic contrast: the direct argument is often specified for some semantic property that is left unspecified for the corresponding oblique. I refer to this as an implicational contrast (what we know about the direct argument implies what we know about the oblique), which forms the basis of a prominence preservation principle. These implicational contrasts, I argue, follow from complex implicational relationships that hold between the basic lexical semantic primitives that figure in these alternations, including degrees of affectedness, possession, motion, and causation. I adopt a theory of lexical meaning in which these primitives are represented as lexical entailments (following Dowty 1991), and I propose a universal set of lexical entailments relevant for direct argument selection that are related implicationally in ways that also predict the types of contrasts found in alternations. Furthermore, the model I adopt to encode these entailments provides a language for tying facts about alternations into various correlating factors having to do with aspect, transitivity, and ditransitivity. I then argue that only a theory that takes semantic relationships such as implication between lexical semantic primitives seriously can account for these alternations. Most previous approaches to argument realization combine lexical semantic primitives together into structured meaning