ABSTRACT
One of the bedrocks of current linguistic investigation is that there is a fairly direct mapping between thought and language. There is an assumption that at some level of the grammar—whether it is d-structure (Chomsky, 1981), argument structure (Grimshaw, 1990), or lexical conceptual structure (Hale & Keyser, 1986)—there is a tie between language structure and a more universal cognitive perception of events. Perlmutter and Postal’s (1984) universal alignment hypothesis (UAH) and Baker’s (1988) uniformity of theta assignment hypothesis (UTAH) are concrete expressions of this assumption. These hypotheses, with Chomsky’s (1981) projection principle (or its extended variants) impose meaningful constraints on verb argument structures. A universal or uniform association of thematic roles to syntactic positions would eliminate cross-linguistic variation in verb argument structures.
