The syntactic categories and positions of the syntactic arguments mostly follow from (a) the constraints on syntactic
expression of semantic categories, (b) constraint (47) on order of syntactic categories, and (c) constraint (50) on the
thematic roles of NPs. For instance, because the devourer and devouree are both objects (or substances), they will
automatically be expressed as NPs. Because the devourer is an Agent, it will be expressed in subject position.
However, some verbs require further specifications of syntactic argument structure for strict subcategorization, for
governed prepositions, and for supernumerary arguments. We will treat thefirst two of these cases in section 6.6.
5.9.4 Locality of syntactic arguments, and exceptions
We have so far beendiscussing the placement of syntactic arguments in single clauses. We now generalize to the larger
case of clauses embedded in other clauses. Consider a sentence like (52).
We can see in this tree that the arguments of a verb are“local,”in the sense that they are all located in the verb's own
clause. For instance, there are no arguments oftellinside of NP 2 or S 3 , and thereare no arguments oftalkeither inside