Event Causation and Force Dynamics in Argument Structure Constructions

Abstract

This paper extends Croft’s theory of argument realization to include nominals that denote events, instead of participants. Events are represented as force dynamic interactions between participants and their subevents. That is, each participant is associated with its own subevent; participants are related to each other through force dynamic interactions as part of a causal chain (Croft 2012). There is extensive cross-linguistic evidence that a participant’s place in the causal chain determines its argument realization. In this paper, we tested three hypotheses about the argument realization of event nominals against English sentences from VerbNet. First, we define an event nominal as any nominal that refers to an event, regardless of whether it is morpho-syntactically derived from a verb. Our three hypotheses are (i) event nominals correspond to participant subevents, (ii) event nominals follow the same argument realization rules as their associated participant, and (iii) when both a participant and its subevent are realized as arguments, the subevent (i.e., the event nominal) is construed as subsequent to its participant in the causal chain. We find support for these hypotheses in the VerbNet data. In addition, we discuss more complex cases of argument realization with event nominals.