Arguments and Adjuncts Cross-Linguistically: A Brief Introduction

Abstract

1. Background This volume is intended to clarify the utility of the notions of arguments and adjuncts for linguistic theory. It brings together papers that reflect current thinking on the distinction and brings cross-linguistic evidence to bear on its relevance. The papers represent a selection of contributions to the 2011 SLE workshop 'The argument/adjunct distinction cross-linguistically' organized by myself, Iren Hartmann, Andrej Malchukov, Martin Haspelmath, and Bernard Comrie (all from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) under the auspices of the Leipzig Valency Classes Project, which has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. 2. The Notions of Arguments and Adjunct 'Argument' and 'adjunct' are notions that are deeply entrenched in contemporary grammatical theories. Several questions attach to these notions, however: Are they typologically useful? Are they universally applicable? Do we need them for describing individual languages? This volume addresses these questions by bringing together papers discussing a number of typologically diverse languages. The question of how to distinguish arguments (complements) and adjuncts has been debated since the 1970's (e.g., Vater 1977), yet it is hardly resolved. One challenge is to find tests that are applicable to all languages. For instance, a popular cross-linguistic test such as verbal anaphora is not necessarily universally applicable. If universally applicable tests are not forthcoming, it would be hard to make a strong claim for the relevance of arguments and adjuncts cross-linguistically. A weaker claim, however, can be made according to which arguments and adjuncts are cross-linguistically relevant, even if the criteria for distinguishing them are specific to individual languages. Moreover, instead of requiring a sharp distinction we may satisfy ourselves with a gradient one (Langacker 1987, Croft 2001). The papers in this volume converge on the view that arguments and adjunct are useful for describing individual languages, but the papers also demonstrate a great variety of criteria for making the distinction, so it is far from obvious how to apply it typologically. 1 Different ways of operationalizing the gradient view of arguments-adjuncts is another trend uniting the papers. 3. Individual Contributions