ABSTRACT
Almost any verb appears in several different verb frames. Verbs are flexible as to how many syntactic argument positions they project, and which positions they project. They figure in verb frame or argument alternations. Such flexible verb behavior complicates the intuitively clear notion of a verb's lexical argument structure. What is its lexical specification if a verb sometimes projects one argument position and sometimes two or even three positions? In this chapter I demonstrate the dimensions of the phenomenon of this lexical-syntactic flexibility by presenting a survey of many different forms of frame alternations in Dutch. The data set includes verbs and their prefixed and particle variants. Describing these alternations in terms of the links between a verb's lexical-semantic arguments and the syntactic argument positions they appear in, I distinguish three kinds of flexibility: (i) the same set of lexical-semantic arguments map onto syntax in both alternants, but they appear in different syntactic positions; (ii) the two alternants have different numbers of lexical-semantic arguments; hence, the verb projects different numbers of syntactic argument positions; (iii) the two alternants have the same number of lexical-semantic arguments, but not all of them appear in argument positions in each alternant.
