Verb argument

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Verb argument

In linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the science study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of Meaning ....
, a verb argument is a phrase

Phrase

In grammar, a phrase is a group of words that functions as a single unit in the syntax of a Sentence .For example the house at the end of the street is a phrase....
that appears in a syntactic

Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing Sentence s in natural languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the Irish syntax"....
relationship with the verb

Verb

In syntax, a verb is a word that usually denotes an action , an occurrence , or a state of being . Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its grammatical tense, grammatical aspect, grammatical mood and grammatical voice....
in a clause

Clause

In grammar, a clause is a pair of words or group of words that consists of a subject and a predicate , although in some languages and some types of clauses, the subject may not appear explicitly as a noun phrase....
. In English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
, for example, the two most important arguments are the subject

Subject (grammar)

The subject is one of the two main constituent every sentence can be divided into, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle....
and the direct object

Object (grammar)

An object in grammar is a sentence element and part of the sentence Predicate . It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb....
.

Nearly all language

Language

A language is a form of symbol communication in which elements are combined to represents something other than themselves. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon....
s identify which phrases in a sentence take which argument role of the verb using case

Grammatical case

In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun indicates its grammatical function in a greater phrase or clause; such as the role of subject , of direct object, or of possession ....
marking of the arguments (e.g. Latin), adposition

Adposition

Japanese language

IPA: [n?iho?go] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages....
), word order

Word order

In linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the different ways in which languages arrange the constituents of their sentences relative to each other, and the systematic correspondences of between these arrangements....
(e.g. English) or a mixture of both, though some rely heavily on context for disambiguation (e.g.

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Encyclopedia

In linguistics

Linguistics

Phrase

In grammar, a phrase is a group of words that functions as a single unit in the syntax of a Sentence .For example the house at the end of the street is a phrase....
that appears in a syntactic

Syntax

Verb

Clause

English language

Subject (grammar)

The subject is one of the two main constituent every sentence can be divided into, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle....
and the direct object

Object (grammar)

An object in grammar is a sentence element and part of the sentence Predicate . It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb....
.

Nearly all language

Language

Grammatical case

Adposition

Japanese language

IPA: [n?iho?go] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages....
), word order

Word order

Chinese language

Chinese or the Sinitic language is a language family consisting of language mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan languages of languages....
s, Korean

Korean language

Korean is the official language of North Korea and South Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China....
).

Information about the arguments themselves such as grammatical gender

Grammatical gender

In linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once....
, grammatical number

Grammatical number

In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
, grammatical person

Grammatical person

Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deixis reference to a participant in an event, such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns....
etc. may be indicated by case marking of the argument itself (dependent-marking language

Dependent-marking language

A dependent-marking language is one where the Marker s showing relations between different constituents of a phrase tend to be placed on the Syntax#Dependency grammars or Grammatical modifier, rather than the Head of the phrase in question....
) or marked on the verb (head-marking language

Head-marking language

A head-marking language is one where the grammar marks showing relations between different Constituent of a phrase tend to be placed on the Head of the phrase in question, rather than the modifiers or dependents....
).

Verb arguments in English

In English

English language

Subject (grammar)

The subject is one of the two main constituent every sentence can be divided into, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle....
and the direct object

Object (grammar)

An object in grammar is a sentence element and part of the sentence Predicate . It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb....
, which are called core arguments. The subject must be present in all well-formed clauses, and intransitive verb

Intransitive verb

In grammar, an intransitive verb does not take an Object . In more technical terms, an intransitive verb has only one verb argument , and hence has a valency of one....
s do not accept any other arguments. Transitive verb

Transitive verb

In syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a direct subject and one or more object s....
s accept an optional object argument. A few verbs (like English give) may also accept a third core argument, the indirect object; those verbs are sometimes called ditransitive. The number of core arguments of a verb is called its valency

Valency (linguistics)

In linguistics, verb valency or valence refers to the number of verb argument controlled by a verbal predicate . It is related, though not identical, to transitive verb, which counts only object arguments of the verbal predicate....
.

Non-core arguments are also called "oblique arguments" or "complements". They are usually adposition

Adposition

In grammar, a preposition is a part of speech that introduces a adpositional phrase. For example, in the sentence "The cat sleeps on the sofa", the word "on" is a preposition, introducing the prepositional phrase "on the sofa"....
al phrases showing time ("in the morning"), location ("at home"), beneficiaries ("for her"), etc.

Core arguments can be suppressed, added, or exchanged in different ways, using voice

Grammatical voice

In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its verb arguments ....
operations like passivization, antipassivization

Antipassive voice

The antipassive voice is a verb Grammatical voice that works on transitive verbs by deleting the object . They are much rarer than the more familiar passive voice, to which they are similar in decreasing the verb's valency by one....
, application

Verb applicative

A verb applicative is a morpheme that increases the valency of a verb by adding a new core verb argument to it. The new argument is a former complement....
, incorporation

Incorporation (linguistics)

Incorporation is a phenomenon by which a word, usually a verb, forms a kind of compound with, for instance, its direct object or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntax function....
, etc. Oblique arguments, however, can simply be omitted without any grammatical adjustment.

Semantic verb arguments

Verb arguments are presented above from the syntactic point of view. However, verbs have semantic

Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning in communication. The word is derived from the Greek language word s??a?t???? , "significant", from s??a??? , "to signify, to indicate" and that from s??a , "sign, mark, token"....
arguments, which may or may not correspond to the syntactic ones. In actual utterances only the syntactic arguments are realized, but the semantic arguments can be inferred from the meaning of the proposition.

Typical semantic arguments are the agent and the patient. Many verbs have other semantic arguments. Languages differ regarding which semantic arguments must surface as compulsory syntactic arguments.

For example, in English, the verb put requires three syntactic arguments: subject, object, locative (e. g. He put the book into the box). It also has 3 semantic arguments: agent, theme, goal. On the other hand, the Japanese

Japanese language

IPA: [n?iho?go] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages....
verb oku "put" has the same semantic arguments, but the syntactic arguments differ, since Japanese does not require three syntactic arguments, so it is correct to say Kare ga hon o oita ("He put the book"). The equivalent sentence in English is ungrammatical without the required locative argument.

The English verb eat has two semantic arguments, the agent (the eater) and the patient (what is eaten), but only one required syntactic argument (the subject) and only optionally a second syntactic argument (the object).

Most languages allow for impersonal propositions, where the verb can have no syntactic arguments (cf Spanish llueve "it rains"). English verbs always require at least one syntactic argument (even if it is a dummy it, as in it rains). (See also pro-drop language

Pro-drop language

A pro-drop language is a language in which certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they are in some sense pragmatics inference . The phenomenon of "pronoun-dropping" is also commonly referred to in linguistics as zero or null anaphora ....
).

Voice

Grammatical voice

In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its verb arguments ....
operations, such as passivization, can change the syntactic argument valency or exchange one syntactic argument with another, but the semantic arguments remain as they were. Compare the following sentences:

She ate a cake.
A cake was eaten by her.

In both cases the semantic arguments are she (the agent) and a cake (the patient), but the first sentence has the syntactic arguments subject and object, while the second has subject and (optional) agentive complement.