The past ten years have been marked by a resurgence of interest in lexical semantics.
It’s a common assumption that: the syntax of a sentence is determined by the
meaning of the predicator in that sentence.
In fact, there exist “linking regularities” in the syntactic expression of the argument
of predicators, they are formulated in terms of “linking rules” which associate
arguments bearing certain semantic roles with certain syntactic expressions. For
example: In English, agents (causers) are commonly expressed as subjects. There are
similarities in the linking regularities observable also cross languages.
The syntactic behavior of verbs depends on the particular semantic class of the
verb and it is responsible also for the linking rules.
Three Qs concerning the nature of the mapping between lexical semantics and
syntactic structure The development of a full theory of the mapping between lexical
semantics and syntax requires that certain unresolved issues be addressed.
•The extent to which the syntactic expression of arguments is predictable:
Fully predictable or idiosyncratic?
•The nature of the lexical semantic representation:
“role-centered” or “predicate-centered”
•Cross-linguistic variation
Q1: To what extent the syntactic expression is predictable?
■Chomsky (1986): subcategorization frames (syntactic expression of arguments)
are fully predictable.
■Jackendoff (1990), Rosen (1984) and Rothstein (1992): more skeptical, there
are certain idiosyncrasies in the syntactic expression of arguments.
Levin & Rappaport Hovav: the mapping between lexical semantic representation
and syntactic expression is fully predictable. Their proof is a case study on verbs of
sound and verbs of manner of motion.
Q2: The nature of the lexical semantic representation?
The earliest theories [Fillmore’s case grammar (1968) and Gruber’s thematic relations
(1965)] were:
■Role-centered: representations were formulated in terms of the name of the
semantic roles, such as agent, patient, theme.
More recent approaches [Jackendoff (1983, 1990), Carter (1997), and Pinker (1989),
Levin and Rappaport (1988)] have been:
■Predicate-centered: Focus on syntactically relevant aspects of the meaning of a
predicator.
Recently attention has been focused on lexicalization patterns (Talmy 1985):
generalizations concerning the types of meaning that can be associated with the verbs
of a language. Verbs of the same class often share a common core but differ in other
meaning components.
According to L&RH such a theory can only be developed once the syntactically
relevant components of verb meaning are isolated.
It appears that the syntactically relevant components of meaning can be better
expressed in predicate-centered approaches to lexical semantic representation.
Q3: Cross-linguistic Variation
