No ordered arguments needed for nouns

Abstract

Syntacticians have widely assumed since [11] that there is a fundamental difference between so-called argument structure nominals (AS-nominals, also called Complex Event Nominals), e.g. destruction, and non-AS-nominals, e.g. book ([1, 5], i.a.). Grimshaw provided a list of properties characterizing AS-nominals, most notably that they have obligatory arguments (e.g. the destruction *(of Carthage) by the Romans). She and others have associated having argument structure with having event structure, but it has never been clear what having or lacking such structures amounts to semantically. In this paper we present extensive corpus evidence that AS-nominals do not in fact exist as a distinct class. This result, we argue, removes an important challenge to [9]’s hypothesis that eventualitydenoting nouns systematically lack an ordered-argument semantics.