While current generative theory acknowledges the importance of argument structure and productive morphological processes, it nevertheless continues to be essentially syntactocentric and has therefore failed to produce a fully integrated, balanced theory of the relation between argument structure, the productive affix-driven operations that alter it, and the syntactic structures it projects. In The Syntax of Argument Structure I propose an explicit, unified theory of the mapping between a verb's argument structure representation and the core syntactic structure of the sentence it heads. This theory's primary hypothesis is that a sentence's core syntactic representation is the direct projection of the main verb's final argument-structure representation, which entails that there is an isomorphic mapping relation between the positions in argument-structure representation and the corresponding positions in its syntactic projection, and that the former determine the latter. In slightly different terms, the premise on which this theory is based is that a sentence's core grammatical (syntactic) relations are the direct projection of the internal relations of the main verb's final (derived) argument structure. It follows that determining and substantiating the internal architecture of argument-structure representation, to which chapter 1 is devoted, is an indispensable precondition for the theory of the relation between argument structure and morphosyntactic structure presented in The Syntax of Argument Structure.

Extensive empirical evidence will be presented demonstrating that argument-structure based morphosyntactic theory is better able than the more familiar syntax-based theories to explain the universal relations between argument structure, the operations (canonically affix-driven) that alter the verb's initial (basic) argument structure, and syntactic structure.