Introduction A boy throws a ball, which hits a window and breaks it. This scene can be described using either sentence in (1), the first with break and the second with hit. (1) a. The boy broke the window with a ball. b. The boy hit the window with a ball. Theparticipantsinthisscene–theboy,thewindow,andtheball–areexpressed in a parallel fashion in both sentences: the boy is the subject, the window is the object, and the ball is the object of the preposition with. However, break can be used to describe a part of the same scene in another way, an option not available to hit. (2) a. The window broke. b. * The window hit. Such puzzles are at the heart of the area of linguistics called argument realization: the study of the possible syntactic expressions of the arguments of a verb. In the hit/break example, the challenge is to explain why two verbs show divergent behavior and why the divergences take the forms that they do. This example, drawn from Fillmore’s well-known study, “The Grammar of Hitting and Breaking” (1970), is particularly apt because both verbs in their basic, nonidiomatic uses are commonly characterized as “agent-act-on-patient” verbs, and linguists often assume that much of what needs to be said about argument realization can be summarized with a simple statement correlating agents with subjects and patients – roughly, affected entities – with objects. Needless to say, such simple statements do not go far in helping to understand the basis for the difference between these two verbs. It has long been known that verbs fall into semantically identifiable classes, which are the basis for generalizations concerning argument realiza- tion.Fillmore(1970)pointsoutthatintermsoftheirlinguisticbehavior, break 1 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521663768 - Argument Realization Beth Levin and Malka Rappaport Hovav Excerpt More information