To appear in CLS 35, volume 1: The Main Session, 1999. Objecthood: An event structure perspective

The notion ‘object ’ 1 has proved useful in the description of grammatical phenomena in and across languages as it picks out a set of noun phrases characterized by a convergence of what Keenan (1976) calls behavioral and coding properties. Concomitantly, this notion has even been taken as a primitive within certain approaches to linguistic representation (e.g. Relational Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar) and as amenable to a configurational definition in others (e.g. the Government-Binding framework). Nevertheless, the notion ‘object ’ continues to pose a challenge for linguistic theory. For instance, to the extent that it is applicable crosslinguistically, there is a fair amount of variation across languages as to the set of verbs taking NPs identified as objects. Furthermore, it is difficult—and some might even say impossible—to provide a uniform semantic characterization of all objects within or across languages, even if there is agreement that the prototypical objects are ‘patients’—what are sometimes called ‘affected ’ arguments. These problems, which reflect the semantic underpinnings of the notion ‘object’, are the focus of this paper