Different predicates allow different arguments to be expressed syntactically and use different grammatical functions to do so, under the constraint that no argument may be expressed by two different functions (e.g., "*Reagan looked his wife at Nancy") and no function may express two different arguments (e.g., "John washed" cannot be synonymous with "Johni washed Johnj"; see [Bresnan, J., 1982d, Polyadicity, In Bresnan J., ed., "The mental representation of grammatical relations", MIT Press, Cambridge]. These different classes are called "subcategorizations" of the verb category.
- Pinker (2004), Pag. 241