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Article published In:
Studies in Language
Vol. 48:1 (2024) ► pp.181–227

Minimal participant structure of the event and the emergence of the argument/adjunct distinction

ORCID logo | University of Colorado
| Far Eastern Federal University
| Far Eastern Federal University
The present study answers the following questions: why the semantic roles of agent or patient are often unmarked; why other semantic roles, such as benefactive, stative locative, goal, or source, are unmarked when used with some verbs and marked when used with other verbs; and why semantic relations such as ‘associative’, ‘instrumental’, ‘reason’, ‘purpose’, and others often referred to as ‘adjuncts’ are usually marked. The study, based on Sino-Russian idiolects spoken in the Far East of Russia, proposes that at an early stage in the formation of grammatical systems by adult speakers, if a noun phrase fulfills the role of one of the participants in the minimal participant structure of the event, the semantic role of the noun phrase is not marked. If the noun phrase does not fulfill the role of one of the participants in the minimal participant-structure of the event, the role of the noun phrase must be marked.
Keywords: early stage in formation of grammatical system, semantic roles, thematic relations, minimal event structure, transitivity, Sino-Russian idiolects, properties of verbs
Article outline
  • 1.The questions and the hypotheses
  • 2.The methodology
  • 3.Basic characteristics of the idiolects
    • 3.1Formal means of coding in the idiolects
  • 4.Functional categories in the idiolects
    • 4.1Antecedent-comment
    • 4.2Reference system of Sino-Russian
    • 4.3Not every clause must have a verb
    • 4.4No grammatical relations and no tense
  • 5.Are there syntactic properties of verbs in Sino-Russian idiolects?
    • 5.1A brief state of current research
    • 5.2Minimal entities in the event
    • 5.3The functions of the unmarked noun phrase
  • 6.The marked semantic role of the noun phrase
    • 6.1Entities incompatible with the predication
    • 6.2Minimal participant structure and the locative and temporal complements
    • 6.3Multiple participants as motivation for the marking of semantic distinctions
    • 6.4Clauses representing a proposition with two participants but including only one noun phrase
  • 7.Summary of basic findings
  • 8.A model for the formation of clauses
  • 9.Implications for syntactic theories
    • 9.1Introduction
    • 9.2Methodology: Object of syntactic and semantic analysis
    • 9.3Constraints about the minimum number of noun phrases with which a verb must occur are language-specific
    • 9.4Distinction between arguments and adjuncts: Constraints with respect to the semantic roles of noun phrases with which the verb must occur are language specific
    • 9.5The verb does not assign a semantic role. The theta criterion is not a property of language in general
    • 9.6Minimal participant structure and properties of the nouns determine whether the role of the noun phrase is unmarked or marked by a preposition
    • 9.7Why, within the same language, some semantic roles are sometimes marked and sometimes not
  • 10.Non-uniqueness of Sino-Russian idiolects
  • 11.An open question
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 24 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.22029.fra
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