Levin and Rappaport Hovav in a number of papers (notably Levin and Rappaport 1986, 1988, Rappaport and Levin 1988) argue that there is no need to make mention o f individual semantic roles because in rules of derivational morphology, like adjectival passive formation, or -er nominalisation formation, and in diathetic cases like the SPRAY-LOAD transitivity alternation, it is possible to come up with the appropriate generalisations by having recourse to a level intermediate between semantics and syntax, called Predicate Argument Structure.
Grimshaw (1990) discusses a level of Argument Structure which she claims exists between “lexical semantic structure” and “deep structure” (1990: 1). Her level o f “lexical semantic structure” is equivalent to Levin and Rappaport Hovav's “lexical conceptual structure”. It means word-meaning. Grimshaw’s “deep structure” is equivalent to “d-structure” in Chomsky’s (1981) Government and Binding theory.
In both theories. Argument Structure accounts for facts to do with
nominalisation, and passivisation. The chief difference between Levin and Rappaport Hovav and Grimshaw is that Grimshaw claims that Argument Structure is organised hierarchically, so that the identification of the external argument is not stipulated, as it has to be in other theories, but it emerges from a consideration o f the properties that external arguments have as a matter of course.
For Levin and Rappaport Hovav it is necessary to identify the following in an argument structure representation: the external argument, the direct internal argument, and any other internal argument. For Grimshaw, Argument Structure is a list of argument variables, with the variables listed within a series o f brackets which are intended to indicate how and when they should be attached to the verb. The external argument is the argument to the left of the list, and it is the most “prominent”
argument in terms of Grimshaw’s prominence theory. These items or entities are akin to two different things in other theories.
If we compare the theory of argument structure to Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994), then it is arguable that it looks like a “subcat” list. The external argument is the subject argument, the direct internal argument is the direct object, and the indirect internal argument is any other argument
o f a verb that has more than two valencies. On this view, argument structure is a device for being able to refer to syntactic relata of the verb, without having to refer to their position in a phrase marker. This view of a subcat list is equivalent to a valency list in a dependency grammar.
If, on the other hand, we view Argument Structure as a semantic entity, then it is not exactly like a valency list, but rather it is like an ordered list in a predicate calculus account o f a verb’s valency. In this light, it is a way of mapping semantic information onto syntactic information (specifically d-structure positions in a phrase marker) or it could be the part of semantics, or conceptual structure, which is “visible” to syntax.
In Grimshaw’s theory, argument structure could be construed as being both syntactic and semantic in varying degrees: by Grimshaw’s own account it is a means o f arriving at a syntactic list of arguments from semantic information: the semantic information involved is thematic information, in Jackendoff s sense, and aspectual information. These two factors build a “structured representation” (1990: 3) which establishes which argument of the verb will become the external argument and which will become the direct internal argument. In this light, Grimshaw’s argument structure is about the relation between syntactic valency and semantic valency. It is either a means o f predicting syntactic valency from semantics or a means of linking syntax and semantics. In the light of the discussion in 1.2.6 above, where I argued that aktionsarts are analysable in terms of localist and force-dynamic information, coupled with a notion o f countability, we might also wonder whether a theory of argument structure that rests on the aspectual character of a verb as part of how it identifies particular participants in a situation would be better recast in force-dynamic terms. Certainly, the causal analysis that Grimshaw recommends (1990: 24), with its suggestion of Jackendovian tiers, looks akin to a force-dynamic account of linking.
In its formalisation, Grimshaw’s Argument Structure does not have a lot in common with Levin and Rappaport Hovav’s Predicate Argument Structure. On the other hand, in terms of its general status as a device for accounting for phenomena like nominalisation, passivisation, light verb constructions and anaphora, it has a lot in common. Levin and Rappaport Hovav’s claim has consistently been that you do not
need to make reference to the content of an individual semantic relation in accounting for adjectival passive formation (1986), or -er nominalisation formation (1988; Rappaport Hovav and Levin 1992), for example, all that is needed is to make reference to a position in Predicate Argument Structure/^ Therefore, instead of stating that passive involves th© demotion of the agent argument, you can say that it involves demotion of the external argument.
Why should a level of Argument Structure be necessary? It appears that one reason why use is made of this concept is that semantic relations are dependency relations whereas, in a lot of theories, syntactic relations are derived from a phrase marker. If it is necessary to refer to the subject of a verb, before the subject has been instantiated, at d-structure or wherever else in the derivation it might happen, then it is quite impossible to make such a reference because there is no appropriate element to refer to. A level o f Argument Structure on this account looks most like a valency list, or HPSG subcat list. It is a list of the syntactic arguments that a head may take, and any rules that apply to it are syntactic rules. Grimshaw, despite deriving her argument structure from semantic information, claims that it is a syntactic level of
representation. On this account, it is a valency list which is derived from semantic information: Grimshaw’s theory makes interesting predictions, which she might well not want to make; the first is that syntactic information needs dependencies, in the shape of valency information, as well as phrase-structure. The second is that syntax is predictable from semantics. Jackendoff s linking rules make no mention of Argument Structure, doubtless because the semantic structure that he devises is organised in phrase-structure terms. Consequently, it is possible to map directly from conceptual structure to syntactic structure.
If there were no phrase structure, would Argument Structure be necessary? I suppose that the answer to this question is one that depends in large measure on theory-internal factors. In the course of this thesis, I assume that a relational account o f both syntax and semantics, where both dependencies in syntax and relations in
This contasts with the claim in Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1991) which states that to account for the transitivity alternations of CLEAR-WIPE verbs it is necessary to use a more fine grained semantic analysis than a semantic role account can traditionally provide.
semantics are organised in terms of prototypes, obviates the need for Argument Structures.