Abstract
In this paper, we present an investigation of the argument/adjunct distinction in the context of LFG. We focus on those cases where certain grammatical functions that qualify as arguments according to all standard tests (Needham and Toivonen, 2011) are only optionally realized. We argue for an analysis first proposed by Blom et al. (2012), and we show how we can make it work within the machinery of LFG. Our second contribution regards how we propose to interpret a specific case of optional arguments, optional objects. In this case we propose to generalize the distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs to a continuum. Purely transitive and intransitive verbs represent the extremes of the continuum. Other verbs, while leaning towards one or the other end of this spectrum, show an alternating behavior between the two extremes. We show how our first contribution is capable of accounting for these cases in terms of exceptional behavior. The key insight we present is that the verbs that exhibit the alternating behavior can best be understood as being capable of dealing with an exceptional context. In other words they display some sort of control on the way they compose with their context. This will prompt us also to rethink the place of the notion of subcategorization in the LFG architecture.
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