Argument structure

Adele E. Goldberg
Table of contents

Every language provides multiple formal means to express basic scenes of human experience including who did what to whom, what happened, how something has changed, how someone feels. But why do languages allow more than one way to express a particular propositional meaning? In this chapter we see that different formal patterns are used in different pragmatic contexts, as each conveys a different construal, or an emphasis on a different aspect of a scene, or a different way of relating the information to the larger discourse structure.

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