Introduction

One of recent generative theory's leading ideas is that syntax is a projection of the lexicon. The primary goal of this book is to explore this hypothesis and to propose an explicit theory of the mapping between the lexicon and morphosyntactic structure. I will argue that this hypothesis is correct if by ‘lexicon’ we understand predicate argument structure, which is an integral part of the lexical entry of every verb and, more generally, of every predicator in the mental lexicon.

My main hypothesis is that a sentence's core syntactic structure (vP) is the direct projection of V's argument structure. More specifically, argument structure has its own syntax, i.e., it has hierarchical internal structure which is operated on by argument-structure specific rules. This entails that vP is fully determined by the homologous structure of the head verb's final derived argument structure. In other words, in the argument-structure based theory of morphosyntax presented in this book, the grammatical (syntactic) relations of a sentence's arguments are fully determined by the internal organization of V's diathesis. It is in this sense that Vheads its clause.

This theory requires that we pay careful attention to whether the rules responsible for a sentence's derivation operate on argument structure (V's diathesis) or on the syntactic structure it projects: many operations that were thought to be syntactic will be shown to be diathetic. For example, wh-movement, which does not involve a change of grammatical relations or case, is patently a syntactic rule.