A fundamental task for language is to provide the rules to map meaning to form. In the communication of an event, these rules should link semantic roles, such as agent and patient, to their grammatical functions, such as subject and object. Despite their importance for communication, grammatical strategies of argument marking (viz. word order, head marking, and dependent marking) are surprisingly limited, complex, and redundant. Why do languages not use a simple and straightforward means of encoding who did what to whom? The starting hypothesis of this project is that natural languages in fact do not have dedicated means to map semantic roles to syntactic functions. Although some constructions are put to use for grammatical marking indeed, they originally evolved for other usages. From this, complex systems have developed in which interacting strategies jointly cover the meaning space. By explicitly taking into account the developmental history of the different strategies, it will be possible to provide a much deeper understanding of the constant rise and fall of grammatical argument-marking strategies in the languages of the world. Thus, it is predicted that the meaning contribution of individual strategies is qualitatively different in different argument-marking systems.