ABSTRACT
A central issue in any theory of grammar concerns the determinants of syntactic structure, in particular, where do elements in syntactic structure come from and what determines the way these elements are expressed in the way they are. The standard assumption in the 1980s was verb-centered and lexical-semantically based: the syntactic expression of arguments is projected from the lexical-semantic properties of verbs and other predicators (for discussions see Wasow 1985; Levin and Rappaport 1996; Arad 1996; Mohanan and Mohanan 1999). The idea is explicit in the Projection Principle (Chomsky 1981), the attempt to derive c-selection from s-selection, the idea of Canonical Structural Realization (Chomsky 1986) and Baker’s (1988) UTAH. On this approach, verbs license arguments by assigning a thematic role to them, in line with the θ-Criterion. However, recent studies in argument expression variation, verbal alternations or lexical-syntactic flexibility from various perspectives pose challenges to this general approach, as discussed in chapter 1. (Ghomeshi and Massam 1994; Rappaport Hovav and Levin 1998; Arad 1996; Goldberg 1995; van Hout 1998; Jackendoff 1990, 1997a, b, 2000, among many others) The solutions to Projectionist problems are of different sorts, ranging from semantic and syntactic strategies to those that invoke multiple lexical entries (see Arad 1996 for discussion).
