Arguments are necessary elements, which have a close semantic relationship to their predicates, to clauses to express a complete thought whereas adjuncts are elements which are not imperative to predicates but essential to help the hearer understand the story, the time or place of an event, the way in which an action was done, etc (Kroeger, 1952). Their distinction is crucial for language education and learning as it reminds people the basic concept that “arguments are verb-specific and thus have to be learned together with each verb, whereas the use of adjuncts is independent of particular verbs” (Haspelamth, 2014, 4).
Arguments and adjuncts are sometimes difficult to be distinguished in clauses. Adjuncts are, however, always optional and can be deleted without creating grammatical mistakes as they are semantically independent of the verb and can be freely added to and freely multiplied in clauses (Kroeger, 1952). The number of adjuncts in a clause is unlimited.
Adjuncts are, moreover, categorised into different groups, such as casual, locative, temporal, etc. In the following example sentence, ‘Sam gave Peter the cake (at the party) (yesterday) (because it was Peter’s birthday)’, there are three adjuncts which can be deleted without making the sentence ungrammatical and provide extra information for the readers. The first adjunct, (at the party), is a locative adjunct as it provides where the action happened; the second one, (yesterday), is a temporal adjunct as it establishes when the action happened; the third one, (because it was Peter’s birthday), is a casual adjunct as it gives the reason for the action. The three types of adjuncts are some of the most frequently seen ones.
Such characteristics of adjuncts are not only applicable to English but many other languages such as Mandarin Chinese. In the following example sentence:
The three adjuncts (in brackets) are also erasable without making the sentence ungrammatical, and more adjuncts can be added to the sentence to give additional information.
As mentioned, arguments are compulsory components of clauses since they complete the ideas of the predicate. For example, the action ‘drink’ requires a minimum of two participants, the drinker and the drunk, despite possibilities of not mentioning one of them in special cases, e.g., ‘The cup of orange juice was drunk’. That manifests that the predicate, ‘drink’, takes two arguments. In the example sentence, ‘Jason drank a cup of water’, the subject, Jason, is the drinker and the direct object, water, is the drunk, and both are required to complete the meaning of the predicate. In another example, ‘Jamie is talking to Tommy’, the subject, Jamie, and the indirect object (and also the oblique object as marked by the preposition, to), Tommy, are obligatory to complete the meaning of the predicate, ‘talk’. Without the subject or the object, the clause and the meaning would be incomplete, for instance, ‘*Drank a cup of water’. Thus, subjects and objects belong to the group, argument. The above can also apply to French:
The arguments (in brackets) cannot be deleted in order to maintain the completeness of meaning of the predicate. Arguments are, however, possible to be optional. The allowance of an optional beneficiary argument (in brackets) of many transitive verbs of the agent-patient type exemplifies such a statement (Kroeger, 1952). An example sentence would be: ‘He cooks a meal (for her)’.
This article can hopefully show that the distinction of arguments and adjuncts is worth studying as it helps establish an educational concept that arguments should be learnt together with the verb, making the mastery of languages quicker and easier.
References
Bauer, Laurie, Lieber, Rochelle, & Plag, Ingo. 2015. The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haspelamth, Martin. 2014. Arguments and Adjuncts as Language-Particular Syntactic Categories and as Comparative Concepts. Linguistic Discovery, 12(2), 3–11.
Kroeger, Paul. 2005. Analysing Grammar: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weber, David. 1989. A Grammar of Huallaga (Huánuco) Quechua. Berkeley: University of California Press.
