Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It has recently been suggested that the different valence possibilities of a single verb stem can be accounted for by postulating lexical rules that operate on the semantic structure of verbs, producing different verb senses. Syntactic expression is then taken to be predicted by general linking rules that m a p semantic structure onto syntactic form (Alsina and M c h o m b o 1990, Bresnan and Moshi 1989, Levin 1985, Pinker 1989, Rappaport, Laughren, and Levin 1987). In this pauper, general problems with such approaches are discussed, including the following: a) such theories require a large number of both distinct verb senses and lexical rules, b) ad hoc and often implausible verb senses are required, c) an unwarranted asymmetry between different argument structures is posited, and d) many generalizations are obscured. An alternative is suggested that involves considering the various valences as templates or constructions that are paired with semantics independently of the verbs that may occur with them. For example, abstract semantics such as "X causes Y to receive Z," "X causes Y to become Z" etc. are associated directly with the skeletal syntactic ditransitive and resultative constructions, respectively, allowing the verbal predicates to be associated with richer frame-semantic representations.