A syntactic verb argument, in linguistics, is a phrase that appears in a relationship with the verb in a proposition. Typical syntactic arguments are the subject and the direct object, which are usually termed "core arguments". The first meaning of the term syntax, originating from the Greek words συν (sun, meaning ‘together’) and ταξις (taxis, meaning sequence/order), can be described as the study of the rules, or patterned relations that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. ... Broadly conceived, linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. ... A phrase is a group of words that functions as a single unit in the syntax of a sentence. ... A verb is a part of speech that usually denotes action (bring, read), occurrence (to decompose (itself), to glitter), or a state of being (exist, live, soak, stand). Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its tense, aspect, mood and voice. ... Proposition is a term used in logic to describe the content of assertions, content which may be taken as being true or false, and which are a non-linguistic abstraction from the linguistic sentence that constitutes an assertion. ... The subject of a sentence is one of the two main parts of a sentence, the other being the predicate. ... In linguistics, the object of a transitive verb is one of its core arguments, which generally represents the target of the verbs action. ...

Arguments can be optional or compulsory. The core arguments are compulsory. If a verb has one core argument (the subject), it's intransitive; if it has two, it's transitive. Some verbs (like English give) have three core arguments (the third is an indirect object). The number of compulsory arguments of a verb is called its valency.

Non-core arguments are also called "oblique arguments" or "complements". They are usually adpositional phrases showing time ("in the morning"), location ("at home"), beneficiaries ("for her"), etc. In grammar, an adposition is a word or affix which shows a words grammatical function. ...

Core arguments can be suppressed, added or exchanged in different ways, using voice operations like passivization, antipassivization, application, incorporation, etc. In grammar, voice is the relationship between the action or state expressed by a verb, and its arguments (subject, object, etc. ... In grammar, voice is the relationship between the action or state expressed by a verb, and its arguments (subject, object, etc. ... The antipassive voice is a verb voice found mostly in ergative languages. ... A verb applicative is a morpheme that increases the valency of a verb by adding a new core argument to it. ... This article is in need of attention. ...

Every language marks the core arguments of verbs using case (e.g. Latin), word order (e.g. English) or a mixture of both, though some rely heavily on context for disambiguation (e.g. the Chinese languages, Japanese, Korean). Categories: Stub | Software engineering | Data management ... Word order, in linguistic typology, refers to the order in which words appear in sentences across different languages. ...

Semantic verb arguments

Verb arguments are presented above from the syntactic point of view. However, verbs have semantic arguments, which may or may not correspond to the syntactic ones. In actual utterances only the syntactic arguments are realized, but the semantic arguments can be inferred from the meaning of the proposition. In the main, semantics (from the Greek semantikos, or significant meaning, derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. ...

Typical semantic arguments are the agent and the patient. Many verbs have other semantic arguments. Languages differ regarding which semantic arguments must surface as compulsory syntactic arguments.

For example, in English, the verb put requires three syntactic arguments: subject, object, locative (e. g. He put the book in the box). It also has 3 semantic arguments: agent, theme, goal. On the other hand, the Japanese verb oku "put" has the same semantic arguments, but the syntactic arguments differ, since Japanese does not require three syntactic arguments, so it is correct to say Kare ga hon o oita ("He put the book"). The equivalent sentence in English is ungrammatical without the required locative argument.

The English verb eat has two semantic arguments, the agent (the eater) and the patient (what is eaten), but only one required syntactic argument (the subject) and only optionally a second syntactic argument (the object).

Most languages allow for impersonal propositions, where the verb can have no syntactic arguments (cf Spanish llueve "it rains"). English verbs always require at least one syntactic argument (even if it is a dummy it, as in it rains). (See also pro-drop language). Pro-drop language (from pronoun-dropping) is a language where pronouns can be elided (deleted) when considered unnecessary or redundant by the speaker. ...

Voice operations, such as passivization, can change the syntactic argument valency or exchange one syntactic argument with another, but the semantic arguments remain as they were. Compare the following sentences: In grammar, voice is the relationship between the action or state expressed by a verb, and its arguments (subject, object, etc. ...

• She ate a cake.
• A cake was eaten by her.

In both cases the semantic arguments are she (the agent) and a cake (the patient), but the first sentence has the syntactic arguments subject and object, while the second has subject and (optional) agentive complement.