Three fundamental linguistic relationships that underlie syntactic structure:
Argumenthood, Modification & Predication
Argumenthood: mostly centers around Verb, the nucleus of a syntactic structure. Verbs, if conceived as Predicates (as Formal Semantics puts it), needs some arguments to complete its meaning, they are the central participants in a situation. Combining verb with its arguments has a syntactic and its corresponding semantic effect. How? Verbs can have recursive function, if its transitive, then it requires 2 entities or arguments unlike an Intransitive verb; examples can be 'invite' and 'laugh'. The number of arguments a predicate can take is its Semantic Valency. And it is Semantic Valency that determines the syntactic structure of a sentence. So the ungrammaticality of sentences like 'She laughed at the stone' can be answered by fact that 'Laugh' is a one-place predicate. But the correspondence between syntactic and semantic argument is not always perfect. For example, the verb 'Eat' requires 2 arguments: eater and object of eating.
"Ram ate a mango" and "Ram has eaten"
the second sentence shows a mismatch between the syntactic and semantic properties. So, Semantic arguments are participants in a situation and Syntactic arguments are constituents that appear in a particular syntactic position.
the second sentence shows a mismatch between the syntactic and semantic properties. So, Semantic arguments are participants in a situation and Syntactic arguments are constituents that appear in a particular syntactic position.
