The Second Language Acquisition of Argument Structure in English

Languages differ in their incorporation of different semantic primitives such as CAUSE, CHANGE, PATH etc. These differences influence the morphosyntactic realisation of events and the participants of these events. This work attempts to trace the source of differences between English and Arabic with regard to their morphosyntactic realisation of argument structure and event types. There are also discussions as to the potential difficulties L2 learners of these languages might have as a result of these discrepancies.