Book Description

This volume presents seven essays that survey fundamental argument realization issues within a typologically broad range of languages. The papers examine, within the architecture of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), the variety of ways in which arguments of a predicate may be realized in the syntax. LFG allows for the complex interactions of arguments, syntactic positions and grammatical functions. Regardless of the complexity or simplicity of the predicational structure of a clause, the papers included show how the relationship between arguments and their overt realization can be dealt with. The papers also treat multiple case marking in Australian languages, possessor alternation in Welsh, directional complex predicates in American Indian languages and causatives in Japanese. They discuss representational issues that encompass underspecification and the encoding of semantic information needed to determine the correspondence of thematic arguments to their overt syntactic realization.