Event participants and linguistic arguments

Although there is a clear and intuitive mapping between linguistic arguments of verbs and event participants, the mapping is not perfect. We review the linguistic evidence that indicates that the mapping is imperfect. We also present the results of a new experimental study that provides further support for a dissociation between event participants and linguistic arguments. The study consists of two tasks. The first task elicited intuitions on conceptual event participants, and the second task elicited intuitions on linguistic arguments in instrument verbs and transaction verbs. The results suggest that while instrument phrases and currency/price phrases are considered necessary event participants, they are not linguistic arguments.

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