A usage-based approach to argument structure

The English verbs remember and forget are typically treated by syntacticians as mental process verbs whose argument structure is characterized by a variety of possible complements. Based on extensive corpus data, Tao (2001) investigates the use of remember in spoken English and proposes that complement-taking is actually a marginal feature of remember, and remember can be seen as undergoing changes toward becoming a discourse particle in spoken English. This paper extends the previous study by bringing in forget for comparison against remember. It is shown that while both remember and forget disprefer complements, forget lacks the placement flexibility seen in remember but allows more tense options; at the same time, forget also has its own pragmatically strengthened patterns in such combinations as ‘forget it’ and ‘don't forget to.’ Overall this study shows that not only can usage-based investigations provide a realistic account of argument structure, a usage-based approach is also instrumental in elucidating the varied local patterns that are often confined to individual linguistic entities or sequences in highly specified contexts, a conclusion which supports the emergent view of argument structure.