This book is designed for an undergraduate student who has taken a computerscience class or three. Most likely, you are a sophomore or juniorprospective or current computer science major taking your firstnon-programming-based CS class. If you are a student in this position, youmay be wondering why you’re taking this class (or why youhave to take this class!).

Many stretches of discourse typically consist of a sequence of distinct events; but many referents recur across events. The tracking of referents contributes to discourse cohesion but is also an element of complex sentence constructions. The most likely (but not necessarily the only) referents to be tracked are the subject referents of the clauses in a complex sentence construction. Hence, the primary distinction in reference tracking constructions is between same-subject (SS) and different-subject (DS) constructions. Balanced constructions may use the standard discourse reference strategy (Chapter 3), or the SS strategy may use a zero subject strategy not used for general discourse reference (conditional discourse reference). Reference tracking constructions may be distinguished such that the SS construction is deranked and the DS construction is balanced (conditional deranking), or both SS and DS constructions are deranked (absolute deranking). If both SS and DS constructions are deranked, but systematically differentiated, then the absolute deranking system is a switch-reference system.

Predicates may be simple or complex. A broad view of complex predicates is taken here, including the expression of tense, aspect, modality and polarity (TAMP) as well as stative concepts combined with event concepts (see chapter 14). Complex predicates are not as syntactically cohesive as referring phrases. Complex predicates have a variety of diachronic sources, although they tend to converge on a common set of complex predicate strategies. Eventive complex predicates involve the packaging together of two eventive concepts as a single predicate, although one concept may also grammaticalize into the TAMP category(ies) for the other event concept (= auxiliary construction), or into a form expressing a participant role (= flag). Strategies include one in which both concepts are expressed in a verblike form (serial verb constructions) or where one concept is in a nonverbal form (deranked; see chapters 14-15) including a nounlike construction (support verb constructions). Finally, a related type to the latter strategy is the semantic development of a verb-argument complex predicate, where the argument originally expressed an object concept.

In which our heroes encounter many choices, some of which may lead them tolive more happily than others, and a precise count of their number ofoptions is calculated.

Peripheral participants in an event may be construed as more salient in certain situations, and hence expressed by core argument phrases. In causative events, an external cause participant brings about the event, and is generally expressed as the subject (a more core participant). Causative constructions vary as to how the other central participant(s) is/are expressed, similar to the strategies found with transfer events described in Chapter 7. In events expressed by applicative constructions, a peripheral participant that is not an external cause is construed as more salient, and expressed as the object (a less core participant). If there is a third participant that is prototypically expressed as object, it may be encoded as object or as an oblique, if it is expressed at all. Applicative constructions may differ depending on the role of the participant expressed as object. Applicative constructions may also have the same form as causative constructions in a language. Finally, there appears to be a hierarchy of nonbasic voice constructions with respect to whether the verb is zero coded or overtly coded.