Overview

Thus far, we have been assuming that the syntactic component of a Grammar contains three main subcomponents, namely:

1. (1) (i) a Categorial Component comprising a set of X-bar principles (e.g. category-neutral rule-schemas and rule-constraints)

2. (ii) a Lexicon (or dictionary) containing a list of all the words in a language, together with a specification of their idiosyncratic syntactic, semantic, phonological, and morphological properties

3. (iii) a Lexicalisation Principle, attaching lexical items (= words) under appropriate word-level category nodes (e.g. inserting man under N)

Let us say that the three components listed in (1) together constitute the Base Component of our grammar. In earlier chapters, we have looked in some detail at the role and form of the Categorial Component (1) (i) in a Grammar; in this chapter, we turn instead to consider the kind of information contained in the Lexicon (1) (ii). We also take a closer look at the Lexicalisation Principle (1) (iii), suggesting that it should be revised, and that perhaps it can ultimately be subsumed under a more general principle, and hence eliminated.

Categorial information

So far, we have considered only one kind of syntactic information which the Lexicon must provide us with – namely categorial information. That is, we have assumed that for each item listed in the Lexicon, our grammar must specify which syntactic category (or categories) it belongs to.