TY - JOUR
T1 - Verbal argument structure
T2 - Events and participants
AU - Marantz, Alec
N1 - Funding Information:
I would like to thank the editors of this volume and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments as well as Allyson Ettinger for her extensive editorial support. Comments from and discussions with Heidi Harley, Jim Wood, and Tricia Irwin greatly improved the manuscript. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-0843969 and by the NYU Abu Dhabi Research Council under grant G1001 from the NYUAD Institute , New York University Abu Dhabi.
PY - 2013/6
Y1 - 2013/6
N2 - 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 anthropology and the humanities, uncovering patterns and correlations across languages in the syntactic distribution and behavior of verbal arguments identified by their semantic roles, and providing structured explanations that capture these patterns in a compact and intuitively explanatory way. But this article will ask whether progress has been made in a different sense - toward a scientific understanding of language. In other words, has the generative enterprise made good on its promise to break from the structuralist anthropological tradition (Sapir, 1921; Bloomfield, 1933) and provide an account of argument structure within a general account of knowledge of language. If such progress has been made, we could argue that researchers in human psychology and neuroscience must take note of the latest theory of argument structure to inform their experiments, not just any account that traffics in thematic roles, word order, and case marking.
AB - 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 anthropology and the humanities, uncovering patterns and correlations across languages in the syntactic distribution and behavior of verbal arguments identified by their semantic roles, and providing structured explanations that capture these patterns in a compact and intuitively explanatory way. But this article will ask whether progress has been made in a different sense - toward a scientific understanding of language. In other words, has the generative enterprise made good on its promise to break from the structuralist anthropological tradition (Sapir, 1921; Bloomfield, 1933) and provide an account of argument structure within a general account of knowledge of language. If such progress has been made, we could argue that researchers in human psychology and neuroscience must take note of the latest theory of argument structure to inform their experiments, not just any account that traffics in thematic roles, word order, and case marking.
KW - Argument structure
KW - Event structure
KW - Theta roles
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U2 - 10.1016/j.lingua.2012.10.012
DO - 10.1016/j.lingua.2012.10.012
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84877060838
SN - 0024-3841
VL - 130
SP - 152
EP - 168
JO - Lingua
JF - Lingua
ER -