For the sake of an argument: Grammatical relations and argument selectors in Baltic. A review article (original) (raw)

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This review article discusses contributions to the study of argument realization, grammatical relations, and case alternations in Baltic languages, focusing on themes such as the Genitive of Negation in Lithuanian. The review summarizes key findings from various articles in a volume dedicated to these topics and emphasizes the significance of argument structure as a tool for understanding syntactic relationships within these languages.

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Lexical Approaches to Argument Structure

2014

"This paper compares various approaches to argument structure. We start out presenting the lexical proposal that we want to defend in this paper. We then introduce phrasal proposals that are common in Construction Grammar. A historical section describes the oscillation between early lexical proposals in Categorial Grammar, phrasal approaches in phrase structure grammar (early Transformational Grammar, GPSG) back to lexical approaches in HPSG and Minimalism. We argue that there were good reasons for returning to lexical models and that the respective issues are not addressed in phrasal approaches. We go on discussing approaches that assume that sematnically compatible verbs are inserted into phrasal constructions and point out that lexical specification of valence plays an important role in various levels of description and that phrasal models can not account for this. A similar criticism applies to so-called Neodavidsonian approaches, which are discussed in a separate section. We will show that certain relations between constructions cannot be captured with inheritance or unification but require transformations or lexical rules, and hence in non-transformational syntax the lexical approach is the only option. Three sections are devoted to arguments from language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and statistics. We show that contrary to frequent claims the respective experiments do not provide evidence for phrasal constructions. We conclude that argument structure properties should be represented together with lexical items. "

Arguments and adjuncts as language-particular syntactic categories and as comparative concepts

In this short paper, I point out that there is a discrepancy between the widespread assumption that "argument" and "adjunct" should be seen as cross-linguistic categories and the practice of providing language-particular tests for the distinction. Language-particular criteria yield language-particular categories, which cannot be readily compared across languages. I discuss a possible distinguishing criterion (the pro-verb test) that might work cross-linguistically, though I also note that it may not be universally applicable. Finally I note that fortunately, the most important typological differences between languages concern the coding of participants regardless of their status as arguments or adjuncts, so that comparative concepts of argument and adjunct may not be so important for cross-linguistic comparison.

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