Open AccessDualist syntax
Author(s) -
Stephen Wechsler
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2008.16
Subject(s) - polysemy , linguistics , syntax , nominalization , lexicon , noun , computer science , set (abstract data type) , argument (complex analysis) , natural language processing , philosophy , biochemistry , chemistry , programming language
A dualist syntax has two components: (1) the lexicon, a structured setof formatives ('words'); and (2) rules for combining those formatives intoutterances. This paper defends syntactic dualism against three'monist' challenges.First, evidence for lexical argument structure can be found in deverbalnominalization, which preserves that structure systematically. Second,words represent the smallest units for idiom formation and contextual polysemyeffects, which is expected on the dualist view but not if word meaningsare composed in the syntax. Third, the count/mass properties of nouns suggestan interleaving of conceptual and grammatical information in semanticcomposition.