Argument mapping software abounds, 1 and one of the reasons is that using the software has been shown to teach/promote/improve critical thinking skills. These positive results are very encouraging, but they also raise the question of whether the computer tutorial environment is producing these results, or whether learning argument mapping, even with just paper and pencil, is sufficient. Based o...

The prevailing approach to understanding the syntactic mapping of arguments and argument alternations is to assume that verbs are organized into semantically distinct verb classes and that class membership determines the grammaticality of argument alternations. This paper presents syntactic evidence that verb-class membership cannot explain the causative and locative alternations, and that alte...

A wide variety of lexical resources have been created to allow automatic semantic processing of novel text. However, each resource has its own practical and theoretical idiosyncracies, making it difficult to combine the information from different resources. We discuss the form that these differences can take, and describe how we overcame some of them in creating a mapping between two important ...

This paper seeks to account for the argument-function mismatches observed in Mandarin resultative compound verbs. The account is formulated within a revised Lexical Mapping Theory which incorporates a unified mapping principle. Under the simplest and also the strictest interpretation of this mapping principle (or the θ-criterion), a composite role, formed by two composing roles, receives syntac...

In recent years, academics and educators have begun to use software mapping tools for a number of education-related purposes. Typically, the tools are used to help impart critical and analytical skills to students, to enable students to see relationships between concepts, and also as a method of assessment. The common feature of all these tools is the use of diagrammatic relationships of variou...