Argument structure

The argument structure of a verb is the lexical information about the arguments of a (generally verbal) predicate and their semantic and syntactic properties.

• "Thus argument structure is an interface between the semantics and syntax of predicators (which we may take to be verbs in the general case)... Argument structure encodes lexical information about the number of arguments, their syntactic type, and their hierarchical organization necessary for the mapping to syntactic structure." (Bresnan 2001:304)

Comments

Argument structure is generally seen as intermediate between semantic-role structure and syntactic-function structure. Semantic roles have a lot of information that is not (or hardly) relevant for the syntax, whereas argument structure concentrates on syntactically relevant information. But it is a lexical level of information in that it ignores syntactic-function-changing operations such as passivization. Thus, The dog bit the cat and The cat was bitten by the dog have different surface-syntactic grammatical relations, but the same argument structure.

Synonym

• valence

Origin

The term argument structure arose in the early or mid 1980s in American linguistics, to render a concept that had long been known in European linguistics under the name of valence.

Reference

Bresnan, Joan. 2001. Lexical-functional syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.