Volume 12 Issue 2 (2014)
DOI:10.1349/PS1.1537-0852.A.441
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Arguments and Adjuncts Cross-Linguistically: A Brief
IntroductionSøren Wichmann Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology 1. BackgroundThis volume is intended to clarify the utility of the
notions of arguments and adjuncts for linguistic theory. It brings together
papers that reflect current thinking on the distinction and brings
cross-linguistic evidence to bear on its relevance. The papers represent a selection of contributions to the 2011 SLE
workshop ‘The argument/adjunct distinction cross-linguistically’
organized by myself, Iren Hartmann, Andrej Malchukov, Martin Haspelmath, and
Bernard Comrie (all from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)
under the auspices of the Leipzig Valency Classes Project, which has been funded
by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. 2. The Notions of Arguments and
Adjunct‘Argument’ and ‘adjunct’ are notions
that are deeply entrenched in contemporary grammatical theories. Several
questions attach to these notions, however: Are they typologically useful? Are
they universally applicable? Do we need them for describing individual
languages? This volume addresses these questions by bringing together papers
discussing a number of typologically diverse languages. The question of how to distinguish arguments (complements) and adjuncts
has been debated since the 1970’s (e.g., Vater 1977), yet it is hardly
resolved. One challenge is to find tests that are applicable to all languages.
For instance, a popular cross-linguistic test such as verbal anaphora is not
necessarily universally applicable. If universally applicable tests are not
forthcoming, it would be hard to make a strong claim for the relevance of
arguments and adjuncts cross-linguistically. A weaker claim, however, can be
made according to which arguments and adjuncts are cross-linguistically
relevant, even if the criteria for distinguishing them are specific to
individual languages. Moreover, instead of requiring a sharp distinction we may
satisfy ourselves with a gradient one (Langacker 1987, Croft 2001). The papers in this volume converge on the view that arguments and
adjunct are useful for describing individual languages, but the papers also
demonstrate a great variety of criteria for making the distinction, so it is far
from obvious how to apply it
typologically.[1] Different ways of
operationalizing the gradient view of arguments-adjuncts is another trend
uniting the papers. 3. Individual
ContributionsHaspelmath thematizes the difference between the conceptual
and empirical domains of arguments and adjuncts through his distinction between
‘comparative’ and ‘descriptive’ categories. He argues
that the difficulty of applying the argument/adjunct distinction in a consistent
way cross-linguistically is shared with many other linguistic categories.
According to Haspelmath, this difficulty should not cause us to abandon the
argument/adjunct distinction, which is highly useful for describing languages,
but he argues against treating the distinction as a universal category.
Schaefer and Egbokhare discuss the West Benue-Congo language Emai. They
apply Croft’s (2001) definition according to which an argument is a
semantic argument of a head and an adjunct is a predicate whose argument is the
event described. For instance, in Randy chased the dog in the park, the
adjunct in the park can be semantically viewed as a predicate whose
argument is the chasing event. Emai adjuncts interestingly provide syntactic
evidence for this type of analysis, since some adjunct types combine with verbs
such as ‘be at’ or ‘take’. A greater propensity for such
‘latent’ verbs to occur increases adjuncthood in the authors’
analysis, allowing them to posit the following scale: Manner < Result <
Temporal < Locative < Reason, where Reason is most adjunct-like. Forker’s strategy towards defining a language-specific cline, in
this case for the Nakh-Daghestanian language Hinuq, is to define canonical
instances of argumenthood and adjuncthood and then to place non-canonical
instances (e.g., agents in non-canonical agent constructions) at points in
between. Creissels applies Haspelmath’s approach in a typological study of
beneficiaries, showing that these elements can have a more argument-like or more
adjunct-like status, depending on the language. In his study of Balinese locatives, similarly to the other authors, I
Wayan Arka also observes a cline between arguments and adjuncts. A further step
is taken by proposing a numerically expressed index to measure how argument- or
adjunct-like a given verb behaves when tested for a number of different
diagnostics. ReferencesBaker, Mark. 1996. The polysynthesis parameter. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. Croft, William. 2001. Radical construction grammar. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. Jelinek, Eloise. 1984. Empty categories, case, and
configurationality. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
2.39–76. doi:10.1007/bf00233713 Langacker, Ronald. 1987. Foundations of cognitive grammar, Vol. 1:
Theoretical prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Vater, Heinz (ed.). 1977. Valence, semantic case and grammatical
relations. Amsterdam, John Benjamins.
Author’s Contact Information: Søren Wichmann
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
Germany
wichmann@eva.mpg.de
[1]It
has been suggested that the distinction might correlate with other typologically
significant parameters. There is, for instance, the claim that NPs show an
adjunct-like behavior in radically head-marking languages (Jelinik 1984, Baker
1996). Such a claim is difficult to sustain if arguments and adjunct are not
universally distinguishable. |