Prolegomenon to a Theory of Argument Structure

Prolegomenon to a Theory of Argument Structure PDF Author: Ken Hale
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262263054
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
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.