We use the term " argument structure " to refer to the syntactic configuration projected by a lexical item. It is the system of structural relations holding between heads (nuclei) and their arguments within the syntactic structures projected by nuclear items. While a lexical entry is more than this, of course, argument structure in the sense intended here is nothing other than this. Argument st...

Productivity has been a much-debated concept within morphology and word formation for years, while syntactic productivity has received little attention within the research community. In mainstream syntax, the concept of syntactic productivity is focused on speakers' ability to generate sentences never encountered before. This notion of productivity captures what has been labeled Linguistic Comp...

When complete, NomBank will provide annotation of noun arguments in Penn Treebank II (PTB). In PropBank, University of Pennsylvania annotators provide similar information for verbs. Given nominalization/verb mappings, the combination of NomBank and PropBank allows for generalization of arguments across parts of speech. This paper describes our annotation task including factors which make assign...

Construction grammar theories argue that the selection and realization of a verb's arguments is largely taken care of by constructions, as opposed to lexicalist theories which constrain the argument structure of a verb in the lexicon. So far, however, no operational definition has been given which shows how this ‘fusion’ of a verb’s arguments with the roles of a construction can be achieved. Th...

Discourse connectives can be analysed as encoding predicate-argument relations whose arguments derive from the interpretation of discourse units. These arguments can be anaphoric or structural. Although structural arguments can be encoded in a parse tree, anaphoric arguments must be resolved by other means. A study of nine connectives, annotating the location, size, and syntactic type of their ...

In previous work I argued against (i) the likelihood of finding a theoretically sound foundation for the linked/convergent distinction and (ii) the utility of the distinction even if a sound theoretical basis could be found. Here I subject Douglas Walton’s comprehensive discussion of the linked/convergent distinction found in Argument Structure: A Pragmatic Theory to careful scrutiny and argue ...

The generative enterprise in linguistics is roughly 50 years old, and it is reasonable to ask what progress the field has made in certain areas over the past five decades. This article will address the study of verbal argument structure. Research in generative linguistics without question has productively explored verbal argument structure within a general structuralist framework familiar from ...

I wish to present a codiication of syntactic approaches to dealing with ergative languages and argue for the correctness of one particular approach, which I will call the Inverse Grammatical Relations hypothesis. 1 I presume familiarity with the termèrgativity', but, brieey, many languages have ergative case marking, such as Burushaski in (1), in contrast to the accusative case marking of Latin...

This paper presents a new constraint, the Antecedent Closeness Constraint (ACC), which unifies the binding properties of control, Super Equi-NP constructions, picture NPs, and anaphors as specifiers of NPs (in English). The focus will be on the last three cases, which share the property of containing an anaphoric element that is exempt from binding theory (see section 4 for examples of the data...