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As syntactic theories develop, more attention has been paid to lexical properties of argument-taking elements such as verbs (cf. N. Chomsky 1986b, Pesetsky 1982, Stowell 1981). A great many syntactic phenomena have been accounted for by referring to the makeup of argument structure. Argument structure, while its role in syntax is irrefutable, has increasingly been believed to be derivable from the verb's meaning. Furthermore, when the meaning of a verb is dissected, a particular meaning component of the verb is often responsible for certain syntactic behavior. One of our tasks in lexical semantics, then, is not only to represent verb meaning accurately but also to identify meaning components that may have specific relevance to syntactic phenomena. The lexicon contains phonological, morphological, semantic, and syntactic information of lexical items, but it is not necessary to specify every bit of the knowledge the speaker has about a word because some properties are predictable from others. Research has certainly verified that this holds for lexical semantics. For instance, a number of generalizations can be drawn holding for a semantically coherent set of verbs by looking at verb meaning. This is clearly exhibited in diathesis alternations where the same verb shows syntactic and semantic variants that are accompanied by a different distribution and a different array of arguments. ... log in or subscribe to read full text