A diachronic account of English deverbal nominals’, in Charles B

Speakers of English can be fairly confident that the object of the active verb eat represents the food or other thing that gets eaten, while the subject of eat represents the eater. This type of regularity, which is important for efficient communication, is immediately explained if the lexical representation of the verb includes a predicate argument structure specifying the allowable associations between participant roles and dependent phrases. Despite the success of the concept of predicate argument structures, it has its skeptics. One influential argument against lexical predicate argument structure, or at least the inclusion of agent arguments in such a structure (the ‘Little v Hypothesis’), is based on English deverbal nominals such as arrival, destruction, and growth (Chomsky, 1970; Harley and Noyer, 2000; Marantz, 1997). But as shown long ago by Carlota Smith (1972), the purported empirical generalization underlying this argument is incorrect. The actual generalization, and the lexical exceptions to that generalization, are explained below by a combination of diachronic and synchronic factors, crucially assuming a lexical predicate argument structure that includes, where appropriate, the agent role. 2. An argument against predicate argument structure Certain English causative alternation verbs allow optional omission of the agent argument (1)