LINGUIST List 9.1333

Sat Sep 26 1998

Books: SYNTAX & SEMANTICS

Editor for this issue: Scott Fults <scottlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Tony Gee, Comparative and General Grammar, Syntax and Semantics

SYNTAX & SEMANTICS

Butt, Miriam (University of Konstanz) and Geuder, Wilhelm (University of
Tuebingen); THE PROJECTION OF ARGUMENTS; ISBN: 1-57586-110-0 (paper),
1-57586-111-9 (cloth); 366 pp. CSLI Publications 1998
http://csli-www.stanford.edu/publications/ email: pubsroslin.stanford.edu


	It is becoming increasingly clear that the classic approach to
linking which accounts for the projection of arguments into the syntax in
terms of thematic roles (and/or some kind of lexical decomposition), has
some serious shortcomings. This volume sets out to explore possible
alternatives, which call into question the assumption that projection is
rigidly determined by fixed lexical entries. Coming from varied
backgrounds, the papers collected here converge on the general hypothesis
that many semantic factors which influence the projection of arguments
should instead be attributed to compositional and combinatorial processes.
Proposals are presented for reassessment of the lexicon-syntax interface
that include models of building up variants of lexical meanings in a
flexible manner, as well as models where much of the putative role of
lexical entries is supplanted by the structural context, in particular by
functional projections.
	Among the topics addressed are questions of argument hierarchies
and adicity of predicates, and the syntax and semantics of argument
alternations in a set of very diverse languages which include English,
Dutch, Scottish Gaelic, Finnish, Hebrew, Kannada, Malay, Greenlandic
Eskimo, and Yaqui.
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CSLI Publications
http://csli-www.stanford.edu/publications/
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Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-4115
Telephone (650) 723-1839
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