(39) a.proud of Bill, afraid of the dark, nervous about the Y2K problem
b. eager to please, nervous that the computer will crashThe adverbial counterparts of the adjectivesin (39) do not admit syntactic arguments:proudly (of Bill), nervously (about
the YzK problem), eagerly (*to please). This is a systematic fact about English syntax: whatever the semantics of adverbs,
they have no syntactic arguments at all.
Prepositions also have argument structures. This becomes clearest when we consider prepositions that occur with or
without objects.
(40) outside (the house), underneath (thefloor), up (the stairs)Somethingcannotbeoutsideor underneathwithoutbeingoutsideor underneathsomething; thatis,outsideandunderneath
have a semantic argument that is only optionally expressed. On the other hand, one can just go up (i.e. rise) without
goingupanythinglikea treeora pole,soupapparentlyhas an optional semanticargument.Thusoutsideandupdiffer in
just the wayeatandswallowdo. (See Jackendoff 1983: ch. 9 for more details of argument structure of prepositions.)
5.9 How much of syntactic argument structure can be predicted from semantics?
This is the big question. What is at stake is the issue of language acquisition. If a word's syntactic behavior (including
its syntactic argument structure) were always tightly linked to its meaning (including semantic argument structure),
there would be far less lexical idiosyncrasy for the child to learn, always a desideratu m(section 4.7). In the previous
section, I have deliberatelydrowned the reader in data, in order to convey a sense of how dauntingit is to answer this
question properly. My answer will be: A lot of syntactic behavior is predictable fro m meaning, but far fro mall; the
syntax–semantics interface is highly constrained but not entirely rigid. I break the question into four parts:
Given a word's semantic argument structure,
- How many syntactic arguments will a words have?
- What syntactic categories will they be?