Instrumental noun phrase as an argument of psych verbs

Abstract: This paper discusses the instrumental noun phrases and prepositional phrases with the instrumental, which appear with psychological verbs. In brief outline we elucidate our understanding of the arguments. The question of whether the arguments expressed with instrumental are arguments or adjuncts has been studied in various analyses (Schütze 1995; Van Valin 2001; Koenig et al. 2003, 2008). The problem of classifying instrumental noun phrases as one of different types of arguments arose in processing the verbs within the different theories of valency. Instrumental can be marked as an instrumental argument, adverbial, predicate or as part of a prepositional argument. We present and propose various formal and semantic tests that can determine the type of argument and divide the instrumental noun phrases into instrumental, predicate, adverbial and prepositional complements.