Phrase Structure and the Lexicon

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

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2. Introduction

   • Johan Rooryck, Laurie Zaring

   Pages 1-5

3. On the Structural Positions of Themes and Goals

   • Mark Baker

   Pages 7-34

4. What’s a Head?

   • William Croft

   Pages 35-75

5. X’ Selection

   • Anna-Maria Di Sciullo

   Pages 77-107

6. Severing the External Argument from its Verb

   • Angelika Kratzer

   Pages 109-137

7. Determining the Kernel

   • David Lebeaux

   Pages 139-171

8. The Lexicon as Bridge between Phrase Structure Components

   • Jerrold M. Sadock

   Pages 173-185

9. Null Objects in Functional Projections

   • Margaret Speas

   Pages 187-211

10. Clitic Constructions

    • Dominique Sportiche

    Pages 213-276

11. The Phrase Structure of Tense

    • Tim Stowell

    Pages 277-291

12. Back Matter

    Pages 293-300

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V, ThemelPatients to the lowest specifier of V', and Agents to a position outside the minimal VP. Again, thematic information is encoded in terms of configurational properties. Addressing the issue of phrase structure in another domain, Margaret Speas investigates the status of null pronominal objects in Navajo. Following Rizzi (1986), she assumes that null pronouns must meet both a licensing and an identification condition. More specifically, she demonstrates that distributional restrictions on null pronominal objects in Navajo can be explained if it is assumed that null objects obey the identification condition expressed by the Generalized Control Rule of Huang (1984). Distinguishing three types of null objects, she argues that relevant licensing condition on two subtypes of null objects involves rich agreement. However, it appears that there are languages lacking rich agreement but with pro in object position. Speas accounts for these phenomena by a rule of economy of projection. A second series of papers is concerned with the way in which functional categories derive aspects of sentential interpretation. Three issues in this research program are investigated here: external arguments as arguments of functional projections (Kratzer), the specificity interpretation of clitics (Sportiche), and the interpretation of tense (Stowell). In all three cases, phrase structure is put to use to derive interpretive effects. Angelika Kratzer proposes that external arguments are not part of the verb.

• Index
• Syntax
• grammar
• language
• language acquisition
• objects
• semantic
• semantics
• syntactic

• Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

  Johan Rooryck

• Macalester College, St. Paul, USA

  Laurie Zaring

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