earticle

영어

This paper delves into some aspects of arguments along with adjuncts, widely illustrated in terms of tests and criteria in the literature. I argue that they are largely syntactic in nature and posited to exhibit the syntactic well-formedness of sentences. It follows that this straightforward clarification of arguments often excludes some thematic adverbial phrases as an adjunct on the one hand and includes non-thematic phrases as an argument on the other. Accordingly, I suggest that we need to posit two types of arguments in this paper: semantic and syntactic. Semantic arguments, which are closely associated with the meaning of the predicate, are base-generated by Merge within VP (or AP) under the VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis (Fukui & Speas, 1986; Koopman & Sportiche, 1991) and receive a thematic role. On the contrary, syntactic arguments are those that are base-generated by Merge outside VP (or AP) or derived by movement to the so-called A-position for syntactic well-formedness, receiving a theta role. This dual analysis of arguments is argued to provide a more principled account of a variety of constructions such as expletive, passive, unaccusative, raising constructions, and so on.