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The seminar deals with questions concerning the relation of meaning and syntactic structure in the verb phrase. Central here is the notion of “argument structure”, the area of linguistics dealing with the manner in which an expression allows the syntactic realisation of its arguments (i.e. the expressions semantically dependent on it). Examples of questions considered are as follows. What determines which argument appears as subject in a sentence, i.e. why can we say “John made the coffee” and “The coffee was made by John” but not “*The coffee made John”? Is there any difference in meaning between pairs of sentences with the same verb but different argument structures like “Fred gave the book to Jane” and “Fred gave Jane the book”? Is there a good reason why such alternations are not always possible (e.g. “I donated books to museums” but not “*I donated museums books”). Which principles of argument structure operative in English are universal and which are specific to English? |
