On Lexical Structure and Syntactic Projection

Donald Davidson’s classic argument that action sentences involve an event place in their argument structure receives important evidence from the overt syntax of Chinese genitive agent constructions, possessive object constructions, and sentences with expressions of event quantification that apparently occupy the syntactic position of objectual modifiers. These constructions present syntax-semantic mismatches that are resolved by an analysis according to which the main predicate has moved from its D-Structure position into the position of an abstract higher “light verb”. This analysis contributes to the literature on the nature of the “event place” with the claim that the event place is the internal argument of the light verb, rather than a temporal or spatial adjunct of the main predicate. This analysis can be extended to other predicate types along with recent neoDavidsonian hypotheses. The paper also examines a number of mismatches between objectual quantification in the syntax and event quantification in the semantics that cannot be accommodated under this analysis, but notes that those cases exhibit a high degree of lexical idiosyncrasy and rightly belong to the realm of lexical semantics.