Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution

5.9.3 Position of syntactic arguments

We now turn to the question of the order in which syntactic arguments are expressed in a clause. For the moment we
continue to confine ourselves to simple active clauses; we discuss the more general case in section 5.9.4.

InEnglish(atleast),theproblembreaks intotwocases: whenargumentsare ofdifferentsyntacticcategories, and when
they are of the same syntactic category. The former case is governed simply by the syntactic formation rules and has
nothing to do with semantics. The principle in question can be stated as (47).

(47) Syntactic Argument Ordering Constraint

NP > AP > PP > clause (where‘>’=‘precedes’)

The reader can verify that this generalization holds in all the relevant examples of section 5.8 ((31), (34), (36), and in
NPs (37)), and that the order of arguments of different categories cannot be reversed (except under heavy pressure
fro mprosody, as discussed in section 5.4). Further, verbs that have variant syntactic realizations of the sa me se mantic
argument yield alternations of order like (48), which conform to the ordering in (47).

(48) a.John mentioned his sickness to Jean.

b. John mentioned to Jean that he was sick.

The only exception is the clausal subjects in cases like (34e, f), which precede NPs or PPs.

This leaves multiple arguments of thesamecategory. Multiple PP arguments are usually freely ordered, in either VP
(49a, b) or NP (49c).^72

(49) a.We talked with Max about Martha.

We talked about Martha with Max.

b. Barb seems like a genius to Elizabeth.

Barb seems to Elizabeth like a genius.

c. the sale of a lawnmower to Bob

the sale to Bob of a lawnmower

The only remaining case is multiple NP arguments, of which there can be up to three, as in (35). The order of NP
arguments isnotfree, as can be seen by

142 ARCHITECTURAL FOUNDATIONS

(^72) However, PP adjuncts such as manner, place, and time expressions invariablyfollowPP arguments such ason the shelfin (i) and (ii), except under pressure fro mprosody.(i)
John put a book on the shelf {with great care/on Tuesday}.
(ii) *John put a book {with great care/on Tuesday} on the shelf.