Linguistic Discovery (Jan 2014)
Cross-Linguistic Variation in the Treatment of Beneficiaries and the Argument vs. Adjunct Distinction
Abstract
This paper compares the expression of beneficiaries with that of typical arguments and typical adjuncts in a sample of languages illustrating the variation in the extent to which NPs encoding beneficiaries show a syntactic behavior more or less similar to that of typical arguments or typical adjuncts. The observations support the position according to which semantic argumenthood as a comparative concept must be distinguished from its possible syntactic correlates, and must be defined as a scalar rather than categorical concept reflecting the interaction between the various factors that may contribute to defining the degree of involvement of participants in an event.
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