ON REPRESENTING AND CONSTRAINING LEXICAL GOVERNMENT OF SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES

This paper considers the lexical government of syntactic structures and makes proposals in a relational framework for the coherent treatment of this information and for a principled constraint on how lexical representations may be interpreted in the syntax. The first part of this paper introduces a formalism for representing lexical governance and demonstrates its ability to make generalizations over what might otherwise require multiple statements in the lexicon. Verb classes that determine syntactic structures are examined in Choctaw, French, Mam, and Hebrew, and in several cases the syntactic structures induced by these predicates involve at least prima facie violations of the projection principle. The second part of the paper addresses how to constrain lexical control of syntax and proposes the valenceinitiality principle, which imposes a precise limitation on the range of structures that can be called for from the lexicon. This principle shares with the projection principle the requirement that lexical governance of syntactic operations be limited to semantic arguments of a predicate. Examples from Choctaw and English are brought to bear in demonstrating that the valence-initiality principle conspires to correctly restrict the interpretation of lexical entries. © Walter de Gruyter