A re-evaluation of the role of predicate–argument structures in natural language explanation

The insight that semantic relations apparently do not stand in a one-to-one relationship with syntactic relations has given rise to the idea of the argument structure of a predicating element as an interface structure between syntax and semantics. In this paper, the fundamental assumptions underlying most of the established concepts of semantic and argument structure will be reviewed both theoretically and empirically. It will be argued that the assumed structures have problematic implications with respect to the explanation of the structure of natural languages. Instead, an alternative proposal is sketched, in which the traditional notion of semantic predicate is rejected and replaced by the idea of the centrality of object concepts, around which concepts of events are dynamically composed.