The structure of argument structure

Abstract

Introduction One of recent generative theory's leading ideas is that syntax is a projection of the lexicon . The primary goal of this book is to explore this hypothesis and to propose an explicit theory of the mapping between the lexicon and morphosyntactic structure. I will argue that this hypothesis is correct if by ‘lexicon’ we understand predicate argument structure , which is an integral part of the lexical entry of every verb and, more generally, of every predicator in the mental lexicon. My main hypothesis is that a sentence's core syntactic structure (vP) is the direct projection of V 's argument structure. More specifically, argument structure has its own syntax, i.e., it has hierarchical internal structure which is operated on by argument-structure specific rules. This entails that vP is fully determined by the homologous structure of the head verb's final derived argument structure . In other words, in the argument-structure based theory of morphosyntax presented in this book, the grammatical (syntactic) relations of a sentence's arguments are fully determined by the internal organization of V 's diathesis. It is in this sense that V heads its clause. This theory requires that we pay careful attention to whether the rules responsible for a sentence's derivation operate on argument structure ( V 's diathesis) or on the syntactic structure it projects: many operations that were thought to be syntactic will be shown to be diathetic. For example, wh -movement, which does not involve a change of grammatical relations or case, is patently a syntactic rule.