The middle construction and the syntax-semantics interface

Construction Grammar and the Syntax-Semantics Interface

A foundational assumption of traditional generative grammar is that a grammar is organized in the mind of the speaker as a number of hermetically sealed modules, which in the course of a derivation hand off data one to the other.1 Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) assumes that the grammar contains no such modules, but rather that grammar is an inventory of signs, complexes of linguistic co...

Psychological Predicates and the Syntax-semantics Interface

The hypothesis of the autonomy of syntax makes special demands on one of the central issues in linguistic theory: the specification of correspondences between a lexical conceptual and syntactic structure. One strategy is to distinguish several layers of lexical representation and allow only one of them to be "visible" to syntactic and morphological processes (cf. Pinker 1989, Grimshaw 1990). A ...

Lambda-Grammars and the Syntax-Semantics Interface

Focus Fronting and the Syntax-semantics Interface

Alternative Questions in the Syntax-Semantics Interface

This paper deals with alternative questions in English, and proposes an analysis employing an alternative operator. I claim that the alternative question interpretation is not obtained by such syntactic processes as movement or gapping, but by scoping of an alternative operator that originates from the conjunction or. Accordingly, while the syntactic forms of alternative questions contain nothi...