(30) Mr. Mustard committed the murder (carefully) (in the attic) (at noon).
I will use the term “modifiers” for the contributions these expressions make to semantics; in syntax they are
traditionally called“adjuncts.”
The range of variation in argument structure is vast; Levin (1993) devotes an entire book to a fairly exhaustive
enumeration ofthepossibilities. Theminimum number ofsemanticargumentsis zero, in“weather”verbssuch asrain,
snow, anddrizzle, whose subjects are normally a“dummy”it.^64 The largest number of semantic arguments seems to be
four,exhibited by verbs describing transactions (31a) and wagers (31b). An action cannotbe a transaction without two
actors, eachofwhomisgivingtheother something; anactioncannotbea wagerwithouttwocharacters, somewagered
object or amount of money, and an event on whose outcome the wager depends.
(31) a.Pat sold/rented a lawnmower to Chris for $20.
Chris paid Pat $20 for the lawnmower.
b. Fran bet Phil a cigar that Mark wouldn't come.In between, there is a bewildering variety of one-, two-, and three-argument verbs. The one-argument verbs range
fro mbodily functions (swallow, sneeze, sleep, cry) to change of size (grow, shrink) to passage of time (elapse) to somewhat
uncharacterizable verbs like those in (32), which have a dummyitsubject and a clausal syntactic argument.
(32) a.It (just so) happens that the earth isn'tflat.
b. Itfigures that John is late (just when we need hi m most).Among the two-argument verbs, a major subclass is the transitives, whose semantic arguments are both expressed as
NPs. The stereotypical transitive verb has an Agent acting on a Patient (33a); but many other possibilitiesare available,
for example (33b–;k). This shows that the transitive pattern is not invariably associated with particular thematic roles.
(33) a.John drank the water. John threw the ball.
b. John imagined/mentioned his pet elephant.
c. The audience applauded the clown.
d. Emily likes/fears/despises cats.
e. Capitalis mfrightens/bothers/disgusts Sa m.
f. Liana left/entered the room.THE PARALLEL ARCHITECTURE 135
(^64) One might think that the semantic structure of the verbsnow is FALL(SNOW),‘snow falls’, where SNOW is an implicit argument. I agree that this is roughly the correct
semantic structure, but would contend that SNOW is not an argument for purposes of argument structure, since it is never overtly expressed as an argument.