A minimalist view of the syntax-lexical semantics interface

This paper presents a restrictive theory of the interface between the lexicon and the syntax. I assume that only a limited amount of lexical information is available at the interface, and, following Borer (1994), that semantic (aspectual) interpretation is assigned at specifiers of aspectual projections, rather than within the VP. Thus, the concept of "Mapping" from lexicon to syntax or the "Linking" of arguments has no meaning in my theory. Instead, the syntax narrows down possible aspectual interpretations of predicates, and aspectual information at the interface forms a constraint on the association of verbs with syntactic structures. 1 The interface between the lexicon and syntax The main question about the syntax-lexicon interface is whether, and to what extent, there exists a correlation between the lexical properties of predicates and the syntactic structures in which they appear. Why should such a correlation exist at all? One good reason is, that a strong correlation between meaning and structure might explain the rapidity of language acquisition: children need not learn syntactic structures of verbs on an item-by-item basis, but rather, make generalizations on the basis of the regular correlation. However, while it is agreed that some correlation between meaning and structure exists, the nature of this correlation differs substantially from one theory to another. Approaches to the syntax-lexicon interface can be characterized according to two parameters, which I adopt from Benua and Borer (1996):