Non-selected Arguments and the Syntax-Lexicon Interface

In the study of human language, the relationship between linguistic form and meaning is a long-standing and important research topic. This project investigates a class of phenomena concerning the combination of verbs with nouns and nominal groups. Every simple predicate in human language combines with a specified number of arguments, such as for instance subject and various types of objects. However, many predicates can also combine with what might, for the sake of exposition, be called "additional" arguments, in the sense that it has been argued that they are not in the core set of arguments associated with a predicate. To illustrate, a verb like break in English only needs a single argument to form a complete sentence such as "The window broke". However, additional arguments are possible, as in "Ben broke the window", and "Ben broke me the window". The project is concerned with two interrelated sets of problems: Firstly, why do many different languages have verbs that behave in this way, why are they often verbs that stand for the same concepts, but why do there also seem to be systematic differences across languages regarding this phenomenon, and how can these differences be explained in terms of other properties of the respective languages? Secondly, how can the phenomenon of additional arguments be unified with the general principles that have been found by research in theoretical linguistics to underlie the grammar and lexicon of the human languages? We plan to develop an account of the described phenomenon that proposes a model of a mechanism in the grammar of human languages that can explain the observed cross-linguistic variation concerning both forms and meanings of constructions with additional arguments. Most of the empirical basis for this study will be taken from the Balkan languages, which, partly due to richer morphology than many better studied languages, expose the phenomenon in a particularly transparent way. Important evidence stems from constructions involving so-called non-active / reflexive morphology present in the Balkan languages.