Semantic Combinatorial Processes in Argument Structure: Evidence from Light-Verbs

Semantic Combinatorial Processes in Argument Structure: Evidence from Light Verbs

1. Introduction Any theory of how language is internally organized and how it interacts with other mental capacities must address the fundamental question of how syntactic and lexico-semantic information interact at one central linguistic compositional level, the sentence level. With this general objective in mind, we examine “ " light-verbs” " , so called because the main thrust of the semanti...

Verbs Aspect and Argument Structure

Non-Verbal Argument Structure: Evidence from Tagalog

This dissertation examines the syntax and argument structure of non-verbal predicates (focusing primarily on adjectives) in Tagalog. Drawing on evidence from a variety of construction types (including Comparative, Existential, and Ellipsis constructions among others), I argue against the claim that adjectives differ from verbs in their ability to project an internal theme argument (Pesetsky 198...

How the brain processes different dimensions of argument structure complexity: evidence from fMRI.

Verbs are central to sentence processing, as they encode argument structure (AS) information, i.e., information about the syntax and interpretation of the phrases accompanying them. The behavioral and neural correlates of AS processing have primarily been investigated in sentence-level tasks, requiring both verb processing and verb-argument integration. In the current functional magnetic resona...

Representing Verbs as Argument Concepts

Verbs play an important role in the understanding of natural language text. This paper studies the problem of abstracting the subject and object arguments of a verb into a set of noun concepts, known as the “argument concepts”. This set of concepts, whose size is parameterized, represents the finegrained semantics of a verb. For example, the object of “enjoy” can be abstracted into time, hobby ...