Reuland Eric J., Bhattacharya Tanmoy, Spathas Giorgos (eds.). Argument Structure

Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007. — 243 p. — (Linguistik Aktuell Linguistics Today 108).In this volume, Tor Åfarli addresses directly the question of whether the lexical semantics of a head play any role on argument structure and argues for the neo-constructionist view. First, he concentrates on made-up verbs, usually proper names or other nouns used as verbs, as in How to Russell a Frege-Church. Åfarli argues that made-up verbs have no semantic-conceptual content that could trigger the formation of lexical argument structure. Thus, a view that projects syntactic structure on the basis of a verb’s lexical argument structure is not sustainable. Second, he discusses cases of flexible verbs, like the Norwegian danse‘dance’. Flexible verbs seem to be more permissive to the syntactic configurations they can occur in than one might expect if these syntactic configurations were strict derivatives of the verb’s semantic or conceptual content. Åfarli argues that a view that derives argu-ment structure by inserting lexical material into syntactico-semantic frames does not face such problems. Frames exist independently of any lexical material in a given sentence; the argument structure of a given word is acquired by insertion in the frame. Made-up verbs have argument structure because they are inserted in a frame, independent of their lexical content. Flexible verbs are actually what one expects under the neo-constructionist view; if frames are independent of lexical material a verb should be able to occur in as many syntactic configurations as there are frames to support them.