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A lexicalist account of argument structure
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English v. German (p. 51) [via PaperHive@docloop] #315

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Regarding this part:

6 Crosslinguistic generalizations

Ash Asudeh wrote:

I'm not sure if this general form of argument is so compelling to me. Yes, it's true that English and German have similar benefactive and resultative constructions, but it's also true that German has much freer word order than English. Our treatment of the BENEFACTIVE as involving the an optional specification on the general ditransitive rule was proposed on theoretical grounds, not formal ones (we could have treated BENEFACTIVE purely lexically), because of the relative rigidity of English word order. So this whole argument seems to me to be somehow begging the question. The similarity between German and English benefactives and resultatives would be captured by having the same template calls. The differences between the languages are captured through what exactly the template call is associated with (German: lexical item, English: c-structure rule). Thus we capture the similarity and the differences (modulo the general success of the analysis for each language, of course, and we haven't attempted one for German). But to say that "German works like this" and "German and English both have benefactives and resultatives that seem very similar", therefore "English must work just like German" just doesn't seem like a valid argument given the theoretical moves available to either of us.

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Stefan Müller wrote:

I did not say that English works like German in all respects. Hubert Haider once had such kind of arguments, I guess just out of fun to claim that all languages are underlingly like German rather than English ... What I say is that the Benefactive-Construction should be the same for the languages (and I show what I mean by this in the HPSG analysis). You sort of say this too by saying the construction is the template. But this is only part of the construction. The template does not include the exact form. My point in the argument is that the form of the benefactive construction does not need constraints coming from the c-structure. If we agree on this your benefactive template does exactly what my lexical rule does. The fact that there are constraints on order in English is very general. It is true for SUBJ OBJ and OBJ2. It has nothing to do with the benefactive construction. The different order properties are general properties of the languages that are independent of the specific constructions in the sense of Construction Grammar. Adele Goldberg also says this. The argument structure constructions enter a general VP construction, which takes care of constituent order.

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