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.

Imagine writing a program to implement a student registration system at acollege or university. When a student is registering for classes,you’ll need to be able to answer questions of the form “isAlice eligible to be added to the roster for Price Theory?” to decidewhether to allow her to click to add that particular course. To do so,you’ll need to know Price Theory’s prerequisites: what classesmust you have already passed before you can take Price Theory?

Clauses may represent one of three types of information packaging. The most common is topic--comment (referent--predication) packaging, assumed in Chapters 6–9. The topic may be the most central participant (the ‘subject’; see Chapter 6), or there may be multiple participants high in topicality. A variety of strategies is used when the most topical participant is not the most central one, or is not a participant at all. Thetic packaging does not divide a clause into topic and comment. Thetic packaging is associated with certain situation types (including weather), and discourse functions such as presentation and background description. Identificational packaging divides the information into a focus and a presupposed open proposition (POP). A number of contexts are typically construed as identificational, including questions and answers and different types of contrast. Thetic and identificational strategies include distinct prosody and word order, and/or distinct morphosyntax. Most thetic strategies involve making the subject argument phrase look less like a subject, and/or making the predicate look less like a predicate. Identificational strategies include clefts and ellipsis.