There is a general consensus among theoretical linguists that the proper representation of verbal argument structure is event structure -- representations grounded in a theory of events that decompose semantic roles in terms of primitive predicates representing concepts such as causality and inchoativity ( Dowty , 1979 ; Jackendoff , 1983 ; Pustejovsky , 1991b ; Rappaport Hovav and Levin , 1998 ) .
semantics and cognition
Ray Jackendoff
Fixed roles are too coarsegrained to account for certain semantic distinctions -- the only recourse , to expand the inventory of roles , comes with the price of increased complexity , e.g. , in the syntaxto-semantics mapping . There is a general consensus among theoretical linguists that the proper representation of verbal argument structure is event structure -- representations grounded in a theory of events that decompose semantic roles in terms of primitive predicates representing concepts such as causality and inchoativity ( Dowty , 1979 ; Jackendoff , 1983 ; Pustejovsky , 1991b ; Rappaport Hovav and Levin , 1998 ) . Consider the following example :
There is a general consensus among theoretical linguists that the proper representation of verbal argument structure is event structure -- representations grounded in a theory of events that decompose semantic roles in terms of primitive predicates representing concepts such as causality and inchoativity ( Dowty , 1979 ; @@CITATION ; Pustejovsky , 1991b ; Rappaport Hovav and Levin , 1998 ) .