Re: THEORY: What, Besides Verbs, Can Take Two Or More Arguments?

On Tue, 2 Aug 2005 11:43:54 -0700, Tom Chappell <tomhchappell@...> wrote:

>Hello, everyone.
>This question is about number of arguments, but not about ditransitive verbs.
>
>Which grammatical categories can take more than one argument?
Well, intransitive verbs and most adjectives are one-argument predicates.
Everything else has two or more. But you mean more than two arguments, I think.

>In which of them do the arguments have different roles?
Very few--I can't think of any.

>In English, a few prepositions, such as "between", take two arguments;
>these arguments both play exactly the same role.
'The ball is between the desk and the lamp.' Three arguments: 'the ball',
'the desk', and 'the lamp'.

'The river is between the mountains.' Two arguments?

Well, we've got a rule that goes something like this:
NP -> NP "and" NP (NP = noun phrase)

Or to rewrite it:
NP3 -> NP1 "and" NP2

And we know that the result, NP3, is plural. So what 'between' requires, I
think, is a plural internal argument. Preferably binary, though you can
imagine a situation in which a lamp, a can, and a bucket are arranged at the
edges of a circle and a ball is at the center:
'The ball is between the can, the bucket, and the lamp.'

>The English preposition "among" is supposed to be similar to "between",
>except that "among" can take any number of arguments more than two;
>once again, all of the arguments play exactly the same role as each other.
'Gulliver lived among the Laputans'. Only one internal argument, but it's
plural. So it's a matter of looking for a plural internal argument.

>What about English words like "than" and "as"?  What lexical category do
they belong to?

Good question. I've got no idea, though it's probably linked to corrolated
comparisons ('the bigger they are, the harder they fall').

Actually (I figured some little bit out without the use of a chalkboard!
Yay!) I'd say there's a phrase head "than" that assigns a comparative value
to an adjective phrase and moves that to its specifier. It takes an object
consisting of an adjective phrase with its external argument (such as "the
farmer proud of his pig").

So you get "-er than the farmer proud of his pig", and then that becomes
"than the farmer prouder of his pig", then you move the AP to get "prouder
of his pig than the farmer". Weird.

>Are they requiring more than one argument, as "than" seems to,
>and "as" sometimes seems to?
Actually, you could look at it that way.

>Are the arguments equal in role?
>Maybe "than"'s arguments are different in role,
>but "as"'s arguments (when it's bivalent) have equivalent roles?
Probably. "Than" takes a predicate phrase and an adjective phrase from
inside it.

>Thanks to anyone who can come up with anything.
No problem. It's probably wrong, though.

>Tom H.C. in MI
- Chris Wright