Lexical Shadowing and Argument Closure
James D. Pustejovsky · 2000
Abstract In this paper, I address the general nature of argumenthood and what logical distinction is possible between argument types. In particular, I examine the syntactic and semantic behaviour of verbs such as risk and cost, and cognate object verbs such as dance and butter. Such verbs participate in an interesting alternation that I will refer to as lexical shadowing. Shadowing can be defined as the relation between an argument and the underlying semantic expression, which blocks its syntactic projection in the syntax. Informally, we see shadowing at work with sentences in (1) and (2) below, where normally cognate objects are shadowed because of the semantics of the verb.