INTRODUCING ARGUMENTS

This concise work offers a compositional theory of verbal argumentstructure in natural languages that focuses on how arguments that are not"core" arguments of the verb (arguments that are not introduced by verbalroots themselves) are introduced into argument structures. Liina Pylkk?nen showsthat the type of argument structure variation that allows additional noncorearguments is a pervasive property of human language and that most languages haveverbs that exhibit this behavior. It would be natural to hypothesize that thegrammatical elements that allow for this variation are the same in differentlanguages, but Pylkk?nen, citing the differences between the inventories of verbsthat allow additional arguments in English and Venda, shows the difficulties in thisassumption. Either the noncore arguments are introduced by different elements withdifferent distributions, she argues, or the introducing elements are the same andsome other factor is responsible for the distributional difference. Distinguishingbetween these two types of explanations and articulating the properties ofargument-introducing elements is the essence of Pylkk?nen's theory. Investigatingthe grammatical elements that allow the addition of noncore arguments, Pylkk?nenargues that the introduction of additional arguments is largely carried by sevenfunctional heads. Following Chomsky, she claims that these belong to a universalinventory of functional elements from which a particular language must make itsselection. Cross-linguistic variation, she argues, has two sources: selection; andthe way a language packages the selected elements into syntactic heads. LiinaPylkk?nen is Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Psychology at NYU.