Abstract
Emonds (1991) claims that many phenomena that I attribute to the effects of conceptual structure on syntax in Jackendoff (1987a) are more properly accounted for in terms of syntax alone. The present paper shows that Emonds has misconstrued the role intended for conceptual structure in the interface between language and cognition. It then specifies precisely where Emonds's approach to argument selection differs technically from mine, and shows that the technical differences favor my approach as further developed in Jackendoff (1990). Finally, an improved account of the semantic selection of oblique arguments is proposed, but it is shown that still not all syntactic argument selection can be eliminated from lexical entries of verbs.
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I am grateful to Jeffrey Gruber, Noam Chomsky, Fritz Newmeyer, and Joe Emonds for comments on an earlier version of this paper, and to Daniel Büring, Katharina Hartmann, Emile van der Zee, and Urpo Nikanne for valuable discussion of issues of lexical insertion. That does not mean they agree with what I have to say here, of course. This research was supported in part by NSF Grant IRI 90-46528 to Brandeis University.
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Jackendoff, R. On the role of conceptual structure in argument selection: A reply to Emonds. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 11, 279–312 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00992915
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00992915