Morphology and Argument Structure

Examples such as these raise the question of how participants which are entailed by the lexical meaning of predicates are made explicit in the morpho- syntactic representation, and whether and under what conditions they may remain implicit: that is, issues of valency. In addition, they raise the question of alternations: that is, where two morphologically related (or even identical) predicates differ in their lexical semantics and in the way participants are realized in the morphosyntax and, in particular, in morphology. This facet of the morphology-syntax interface has come to be referred to as 'argument structure'. This term means different things to different authors, and one of our aims will be to make explicit a number of distinctions between some of the different types of realization and different types of alternation that have fallen under this term.