ABSTRACT
Since syntactic-semantic distance correlates to a considerable extent with the ease or difficulty with which language may be processed for production and comprehension, then it should not be surprising to learn that degree of distance has a bearing on learnability. There are other aspects of semantic relationship in English that learners find challenging. Other aspects, however, seem very special to English and here the learners challenge turns out to be commensurately special as well. Among the various semantic arguments contracting relations with their verbs, there is one that universally lends itself most readily to service as grammatical subject. All language learners, it would seem, make at least some use at some time of a dictionary, whether desk-size or pocket-size, bilingual or monolingual, up-to-date or obsolete. Discussion, in turn, of verb-argument relations, collocation and lexical properties has progressively narrowed our area of inquiry from the full sentence to single lexical items and their immediate context.
