518 ROBERT D. VAN VALIN, JR. & DAVID P. WILKINS
This analysis demonstrates that given the theories of lexical decompos
ition and clause linkage discussed here, the only information that needs to
be listed in the lexical entry for remember is the decomposed semantic rep
resentation presented above; all of the facts about complement types follow
from that. This conclusion is radically opposed to that of Grimshaw (1979)
and Jackendoff (1985), both of whom argue that syntactic and semantic
information about complements and other arguments must be listed sepa
rately in the lexical entry of each verb. In the cases where y is realized mor-
phosyntactically by a simple NP, the analysis terminates after the interpre
tations are determined and it is at this stage that language-specific mor-
phosyntactic principles assign the form that thematic-relation bearing argu
ments are to take.3. The realizations of remember in Mparntwe Arrernte
Mparntwe Arrernte (MpA) is the traditional language spoken in and about
the township of Alice Springs, in Central Australia. It belongs to the Aran-
dic subfamily of the Pama-Nyungan family of Australian languages, and,
except for its phonology, is fairly typical of Pama-Nyungan languages. It is
an agglutinative language which employs only suffixes, no prefixes, and has
an extensive system of case marking (i.e. it has 14 cases), as well as a com
plex verb structure with seven distinct positions in the verb stem (i.e. the
root plus a slot for derivational suffixes and then five positions for different
types of inflectional suffixes). Noun phrases have a fixed constituent order,
and case marking of the phrase is by peripheral attachment to the final ele
ment in the phrase. Phrase order in the clause is pragmatically governed,
but there is a tendency for core arguments to precede the verb and
peripheral elements to follow the verb. A detailed grammar of the language
can be found in Wilkins (1990), and studies of particular morphological,
syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of the language can be found in
Wilkins (1984a,1984b,1986,1988). Before discussing the MpA forms which
are translational equivalents of English remember, it is necessary to briefly
sketch complementation in the language.
Using Noonan's (1985:42, 64) universal semantic characterisation of
complementation as "the grammatical state where a predication functions
as an argument of a predicate", three general complement types may be
identified in Mparntwe Arrernte: purposive (psych-action) complements,