Adjuncts or Complements?

  The traditional treatments of dative PPs force the semantic contribution of these PPs to be specified explicitly in the lexical entry for each verb which can appear with a dative PP, essentially treating the preposition as a marker for a particular verbal relation and a particular semantic role, with no independent contribution. These approaches seem to demand the syntactic subcategorisation of dative PPs, even in cases in which they are syntactically optional such as exp2, since they model the dative alternation as a permutation of a verb's subcategorisation list. This ignores generalisations over the contribution of the PPs, in that the PPs seem to add similar information regardless of which specific verb they appear with. Thus in each of exp2a and exp3a, the PP for Mary specifies who benefits from (some aspect of) the event described in the remainder of the sentence.

 

John made a drawing for Mary. John made Mary a drawing.

Likewise, the contribution of the inner NP in the alternate in exp2b of exp2a and the alternate in exp3b of exp3a can be identified as specifying who receives benefit from the outer NP (a cake and a drawing, respectively).

A general question arises from the observation of such generalisations -- what is the status of these PP elements? Should they be treated as subcategorised-for complements or as adjuncts which make an independent, identifiable, semantic contribution across verbal heads? This will be investigated below through a series of standard syntactic and semantic tests for argument structure. The two types of dative PPs, -PPs and -PPs, will be contrasted in this investigation. The analysis will show that -dative PPs and certain -dative PPs behave as complements syntactically while behaving as adjuncts semantically. The remaining -dative PPs behave as complements both syntactically and semantically.

 
• Syntactic Tests for Argument Structure
  • The ``do so'' Test
  • Iterability test
  • Relative Order
  • Complement-Internal Gaps
• Semantic Tests for Argument Structure
  • Constancy of Semantic Contribution
  • Entailment Tests
• Conclusions