Prolegomenon to a Theory of Argument Structure

Download or read book Prolegomenon to a Theory of Argument Structure written by Ken Hale and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002-10-11 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is the culmination of an eighteen-year collaboration between Ken Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser on the study of the syntax of lexical items. It examines the hypothesis that the behavior of lexical items may be explained in terms of a very small number of very simple principles. In particular, a lexical item is assumed to project a syntactic configuration defined over just two relations, complement and specifier, where these configurations are constrained to preclude iteration and to permit only binary branching. The work examines this hypothesis by methodically looking at a variety of constructions in English and other languages.