LINGUIST List 12.2240

Fri Sep 14 2001

Books: Syntax

Editor for this issue: Richard John Harvey <richardlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Christine Sosa, New Book: LINKING BY TYPES IN THE HIERARCHICAL LEXICON

CSLI Publications is pleased to announce the availability of:

LINKING BY TYPES IN THE HIERARCHICAL LEXICON; Anthony R. Davis; paper 
ISBN: 1-57586-224-7, $22.95; cloth ISBN 1-57586-223-9, $64.95, 320 
pages. CSLI Publications 2001. http://cslipublications.stanford.edu , 
email: pubscsli.stanford.edu.

To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. Call 
their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736 (U.S. & Canada only) or 
order online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ (use the search 
feature to locate the book, then order).

Book description:
Verbs denote types of situations, and their subjects, objects, and 
other arguments denote various participants in those types of 
situations. This book addresses the linguistic principles that
determine how the syntactic arguments of verbs and the participant 
roles in situations are related.

Many previous approaches to this problem have employed a set of 
thematic roles, such as agent and patient, to classify varieties of
participants. The alternative presented here, within the framework of 
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, uses typed feature structures 
and a hierarchy of word classes to model certain basic features of 
verb meaning, from which an account of the mapping between 
participant roles and syntactic arguments is developed. Evidence from 
a broad range of verbal phenomena in various languages, including 
argument-structure alternations such as causativization and 
applicative formation, bolsters the model. Relying on no special 
mechanisms or components of grammar, this account is based on a
simple yet widely applicable set of constraints, which permit the 
observed mappings and rule out impossible ones.