Marijana Marelj

The theta system : argument structure at the interface

1. Introduction: The Theta System 2. The Linguistic Expression of Causation 3. The Content of Semantic Roles: Predicate-argument structure in language and cognition 4. Combine 5. In the Event of a Nominal 6. Lexicon Uniformity and the Causative Alternation 7. In Defense of the Non-causative Analysis of Anticausatives 8. Hidden Entries: A psycholinguistic study of derivational gaps 9. To Have the Empty Theta-role 10. Emission Verbs 11. Verbal Passives in English and Hebrew: A comparative study 12. An Event Semantics for the Theta System 13. Children Acquire Unaccusative and A-movement Very Early on

Mistaking For: Testing the Theory of Mediated Predication

This article investigates the validity of the theory of mediated predication by examining one of the proposed overt realizations of Pred0. Taking the law of parsimony as our starting position and using evidence from English, Russian, and Serbo-Croatian, we argue that the element that looks like the preposition ‘for’ is, in fact, a preposition (not Pred0), and we show how it explains the syntax and the semantics of the relevant ‘for’ sequences. Cases of apparently predicative interpretation of ‘for’-PP result from the interplay between the meaning of the preposition ‘for’ and the metaphorical reinterpretation of motion and locative verbs that ‘for’-PPs combine with.