Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Although there is a clear and intuitive mapping between lin-guistic arguments of verbs and event participants, the mappingis not perfect. We review the linguistic evidence that indicatesthat the mapping is imperfect. We also present the results of anew experimental study that provides further support for a dis-sociation between event participants and linguistic arguments.The study consists of two tasks. The first task elicited intu-itions on conceptual event participants, and the second taskelicited intuitions on linguistic arguments in instrument verbsand transaction verbs. The results suggest that while instru-ment phrases and currency/price phrases are considered neces-sary event participants, they are not linguistic arguments.