Verb argument - Citizendia

A syntactic verb argument, in linguistics, is a phrase that appears in a relationship with the verb in a clause. In Linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek grc συν- syn-, "together" and grc τάξις táxis, "arrangement" is the Linguistics is the scientific study of Language, encompassing a number of sub-fields In Grammar, a phrase is a group of Words that functions as a single unit in the Syntax of a sentence. For English usage of verbs see the wiki article English verbs. In Grammar, a clause is a word or group of words that consists of a subject and a predicate, although in some Languages and some types of Typical syntactic arguments are the subject and the direct object, which are usually termed "core arguments". According to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle, every sentence can be divided in two main constituents, one being the subject of the sentence and the An object in Grammar is a Sentence element and part of the sentence predicate.

Arguments can be optional or compulsory. The core arguments are compulsory. If a verb has one core argument (the subject), it is intransitive; if it has two, it is a transitive verb. In Grammar, an intransitive Verb does not take an object. In more technical terms an intransitive verb has only one argument (its subject In Syntax, a transitive verb is a Verb that requires both a subject and one or more objects Some examples of sentences with transitive verbs Some verbs (like English give) have three core arguments (the third is an indirect object); this is sometimes called ditransitive. In Grammar, a ditransitive verb is a Verb which takes a subject and two objects According to certain linguistics considerations these objects The number of compulsory arguments of a verb is called its valency. In Linguistics, verb valency or valence refers to the number of arguments controlled by a verbal predicate.

Non-core arguments are also called "oblique arguments" or "complements". They are usually adpositional phrases showing time ("in the morning"), location ("at home"), beneficiaries ("for her"), etc. In Grammar, a preposition is a Part of speech that introduces a prepositional phrase.

Core arguments can be suppressed, added, or exchanged in different ways, using voice operations like passivization, antipassivization, application, incorporation, etc. In Grammar, the voice (also called gender or diathesis of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state that the verb expresses and the participants identified In Grammar, the voice (also called gender or diathesis of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state that the verb expresses and the participants identified The antipassive voice is a Verb voice found mostly in ergative languages Like the Passive voice, the antipassive decreases the verb's valency A verb applicative is a Morpheme that increases the valency of a Verb by adding a new core argument to it 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 Oblique arguments, however, can simply be omitted without any grammatical adjustment.

Nearly all languages identify which phrases in a sentence take which core argument role of the verb using case marking of the arguments (e. A language is a dynamic set of visual auditory or tactile Symbols of Communication and the elements used to manipulate them In Grammar, the case of a Noun or Pronoun indicates its Grammatical function in a greater Phrase or Clause; such as the g. Latin), word order (e. 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 g. English) or a mixture of both, though some rely heavily on context for disambiguation (e. g. the Chinese languages, Japanese, Korean).

Information about the arguments themselves such as grammatical gender, grammatical number, grammatical person etc. In Linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called Noun classes are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words every noun must belong In linguistics grammatical number is a Grammatical category of nouns pronouns and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one" Grammatical person, in Linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event such as the speaker the Addressee, or others may be indicated by case marking of the argument itself (dependent-marking language) or marked on the verb (head-marking language). A dependent-marking Language is one where the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a Phrase tend to be placed on the A head-marking Language is one where the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a phrase tend to be placed on the heads

Semantic verb arguments

Verb arguments are presented above from the syntactic point of view. However, verbs have semantic arguments, which may or may not correspond to the syntactic ones. Semantics is the study of meaning in communication The word derives from Greek σημαντικός ( semantikos) "significant" from 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 in the box). It also has 3 semantic arguments: agent, theme, goal. On the other hand, the Japanese 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"). is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities 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). A pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping" is a Language in which certain classes of Pronouns may be omitted when they are in some sense pragmatically

Voice 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. In Grammar, the voice (also called gender or diathesis of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state that the verb expresses and the participants identified 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.