Which branch of government can be considered the most powerful? What role did stem-cell research play in the 2004 presidential election? Or, explore the construction of race through Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye. Each of these require you to build an argument to show the instructor that you know the information and can logically think through it to clearly express a point or position.
While the argument structure of verbs has long been a central issue in linguistic research of all varieties and continues to be a vexed area of research across a wide range of theoretical and empirical approaches, the inter-disciplinary perspective and dialogue remain largely under explored. This collection stems from an interest to find and explore practical, tangible points of intersection between theoretical linguists, psycholinguists and neurolinguists working on problems related to the representation and processing of verbs and their associated thematic structure.
Introducing Arguments (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs, Book 49)
This concise work offers a compositional theory of verbal argument structure in natural languages that focuses on how arguments that are not "core" arguments of the verb (arguments that are not introduced by verbal roots themselves) are introduced into argument structures. Liina Pylkkänen shows that the type of argument structure variation that allows additional noncore arguments is a pervasive property of human language and that most languages have verbs that exhibit this behavior.
The argument structure of verbs, defined as the part of grammar that deals with how participants in verbal events are expressed in clauses, is a classical topic in linguistics that has received considerable attention in the literature. This book investigates argument structure in English from a usage-based perspective, taking the view that the cognitive representation of grammar is shaped by language use, and that crucial aspects of grammatical organization are tied to the frequency with which words and syntactic constructions are used.
No one writes for the introductory composition student like Kirszner and Mandell—the best-selling authors of the most successful reader in America, Patterns for College Writing. Their most recent success, Practical Argument, Second Edition, simplifies the study of argument. A straightforward, full-color, accessible introduction to argumentative writing, it employs an exercise-driven, thematically focused, step-by-step approach to get to the heart of what students need to understand argument. Practical Argument focuses on basic principles of classical argument and includes alternative approaches.
