At the Lexicon-Grammar Interface: The Case of Complex Predicates in the Functional Generative Description

Complex predicates with light verbs have proven to be very challenging for syntactic theories, particularly due to the tricky distribution of valency complementations of light verbs and predicative nouns (or other predicative units) in their syntactic structure. We propose a theoretically adequate and economical representation of complex predicates with Czech light verbs based on a division of their description between the lexicon and the grammar. We demonstrate that a close interplay between these two components makes the analysis of the deep and surface syntactic structures of complex predicates reliable and efficient.