Aspect and the Syntax of Argument Structure

We use the term " argument structure " to refer to the syntactic configuration projected by a lexical item. It is the system of structural relations holding between heads (nuclei) and their arguments within the syntactic structures projected by nuclear items. While a lexical entry is more than this, of course, argument structure in the sense intended here is nothing other than this. Argument structure is determined by properties of lexical items, in particular, by the syntactic configurations in which they must appear. There are just two syntactic relations, complement and specifier, defined so as to preclude iteration and to permit only binary branching. These assumptions delimit a certain project, i.e., that of ascertaining the extent to which the observed behavior of lexical items is due to structural relations, as opposed to the interaction of structure and some other component, that is to say, to matters which we will refer to as "questions of interface." We take (1) and (2) to be structurally distinct: (1) The pot broke. (2) The engine coughed. And this structural difference accounts for their behavior in relation to the standard causative-inchoative transitivity alternation: (3) I broke the pot. (4) *I coughed the engine. The properties which distinguish these two verbs are the following. The verb break, as illustrated in (1) and (3) consists of the following structural elements, a root (R) and a verbal host (V): (5) R, V The verbal component has the property that it takes a complement, realized here as the root. The latter contains the semantic and phonological features associated with the dictionary entry break. The root component requires a specifier, as shown in (6):