Goldberg (1995): Constructions #

This file formalizes Goldberg's account of argument structure, in which argument structure constructions carry meaning of their own and a verb's participant roles fuse with a construction's argument roles. A construction's meaning is a predicate, CAUSE-RECEIVE for the ditransitive, CAUSE-MOVE for caused motion, CAUSE-BECOME for the resultative, MOVE for intransitive motion and DIRECT-ACTION-AT for the conative, over an argument structure, a frame whose slots admit thematic roles. The verbs are the English fragment's entries, so a verb's participant roles are the slots of its lexical argument structure. The fusions the book draws follow from its Semantic Coherence and Correspondence Principles, and the constructions form a network of normal-mode inheritance links.

Main results #

isFusion_kick_iff: kick fuses with the ditransitive in only one way (Fig. 2.9)
put_uses_exception: put fuses with caused motion only through the three-role exception (Fig. 2.7)
isFusion_mail: the ditransitive profiles mail's mailee (Fig. 2.8)
wipe_talk_contributed: the resultative adds a result-goal to wipe and a patient as well to talk (Fig. 8.2)
not_isFusion_become: become cannot fuse with the resultative (p. 190)
exists_fused: every construction shares a participant with its verb (p. 65)
network_wellTyped, inherited_statedForm, ditransitive_meaning_ne: the network's links respect their types, and the ditransitive's senses share its form but not its meaning

Implementation notes #

Argument roles are ThetaRole labels: the cause of caused motion admits the labels whose Dowty profile entails causation, and the resultative's result-goal is a goal, change of state being change of location (pp. 81–84). A verb's participant roles are its fragment entry's argument structure, extended by the roles the book construes them as; its lexical profiling is the book's boldface. Caused motion's theme is contributable, as in Fig. 7.1 and the sneeze case, where Fig. 2.6 draws it as required.

TODO #

The conative admits a verb of its intended result only if the verb is [+motion, +contact] (Figs. 2.13–2.15, p. 63), features the book takes from Guerssel, Hale, Laughren, Levin and White Eagle (1985). Until those features are formalized the conative lists only the subtype relation, and no construction restricts a relation by features (Feature is empty). Adding the intended-result relation will not by itself admit kick at: the conative's theme is oblique and so not profiled, and the Correspondence Principle forbids a verb profiling two roles, as kick does in Fig. 2.9, from fusing one with a nonprofiled role; the book does not say how a verb of the intended result fuses. The intransitive resultative (Fig. 8.3), the passive's thematic hierarchy (p. 57), send (Fig. 2.11) and the senses of caused motion (p. 76) are not modelled.

Goldberg (1995): Constructions #

Main results #

Implementation notes #

TODO #

References #

Meanings #

The argument structure constructions #

Verbs in constructions (§2.4) #

The network (§3.3) #