Verbs and Participants: Nonlinguists' Intuitions

Arguments and adjuncts play a crucial role in linguistic theories. Despite the vast body of research that assumes a distinction between arguments and adjuncts, not only in linguistics, but also in philosophy of language, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, there are no universally agreed-upon definitions distinguishing the two. The modest aim of this thesis is to investigate English speakers’ intuitions with respect to verbs and their arguments. To do so, the study makes use of the Core Participants Test, disguised in four different tasks, with each task eliciting, arguably, the same kind of intuitions. The results indicate that different tasks tap into either semantic or syntactic intuitions, or sometimes both. Overall, speakers' intuitions often matched linguists' views.