The Penn Treebank has recently implemented a new syntactic annotation scheme, designed to highlight aspects of predicate-argument structure. This paper discusses the implementation of crucial aspects of this new annotation scheme. It incorporates a more consistent treatment of a wide range of grammatical phenomena, provides a set of coindexed null elements in what can be thought of as "underlyi...

Morphologically derived causatives are composed of a causative morpheme and a base verb. It is generally accepted that the causative morpheme is a two-place predicate expressing a relation between a causer and a caused event. This has suggested to some researchers that morphological causatives have essentially the same syntactic representation at D-Structure as English periphrastic causatives i...

Neuroimaging and lesion studies suggest that processing of word classes, such as verbs and nouns, is associated with distinct neural mechanisms. Such studies also suggest that subcategories within these broad word class categories are differentially processed in the brain. Within the class of verbs, argument structure provides one linguistic dimension that distinguishes among verb exemplars, wi...

This paper will argue the following points. 1) What is a semantic status of prepositional phrases in such sentences as "Tom is good at tennis," "It is wise of Tom to go there," "This book is easy for John to read. "? 2) What is the semantic status of to infinitive (henceforth, to VP) in the following sentences : "He is honest to bring back the money," "He is sure to win." 3) Is there a semantic...

This paper presents a design pattern for handling argument structure and offers a concrete operationalization of this pattern in Fluid Construction Grammar. Argument structure concerns the mapping between ‘participant structure’ (who did what to whom) and instances of ‘argument realization’ (the linguistic expression of participant structures). This mapping is multilayered and indirect, which p...

Adverbial derivatives (AdvD) of nouns of the type v jarosti ‘in a rage’, s naslaždeniem ‘with pleasure’, pod predlogom ‘under the pretext of’ etc. often inherit the arguments (actants) of the noun they are derived from. However, as a rule, in case of AdvDs these arguments are realized in a way very different from the nouns. The main linguistic findings of the paper consist in the set of positio...

This paper describes research on parsing Tagalog text for predicate–argument structure (PAS). We first outline the linguistic phenomenon and corpus annotation process, then detail a series of PAS parsing experiments.

Syntactic constructions roughly correspond to sentence meanings. Previous research has shown that Chinese children can associate an SVO construction with a causative event at age 2, but do not always map an SV construction to a noncausative event even after reaching 5 years of age. The latter results may be attributed to the fact that Chinese allows argument-dropping (Jiang & Haryu, 2010). This...

Neural correlates exist for a basic component of logical formulae, PREDICATE(x). Vision and audition research in primates and humans shows two independent neural pathways; one locates objects in body-centered space, the other attributes properties, such as colour, to objects. In vision these are the dorsal and ventral pathways. In audition, similarly separable "where" and "what" pathways exist....