Prolegomenon to a Theory of Argument Structure

by Hale, Ken; Keyser, Samuel Jay

• ISBN13: 9780262582148
• ISBN10: 0262582147
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-10-11
• Publisher: The MIT Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Ken Hale (deceased) was the Ferrari P. Ward Professor Emeritus in Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Samuel Jay Keyser is Peter de Florez Emeritus Professor in MIT's Department of Linguistics and Philosophy and Special Assistant to the Chancellor. Head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy from 1977 to 1998, he also held the positions of Director of the Center for Cognitive Science and Associate Provost.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword	vii
Preface	ix
The Basic Elements of Argument Structure	1	(28)
Bound Features, Merge, and Transitivity Alternations	29	(18)
Conflation	47	(58)
A Native American Perspective	105	(54)
On the Double Object Construction	159	(30)
There-Insertion Unaccusatives	189	(16)
Aspect and the Syntax of Argument Structure	205	(22)
On the Time of Merge	227	(22)
Notes	249	(12)
References	261	(8)
Index	269