ABSTRACT
There is what might be called a received view of the lexicon—the way people in generative grammar are used to thinking of it. This includes the following propositions:
Received View 1: The lexicon consists mostly of words. Idioms, which are multiword constructions, are a relatively marginal part of the lexicon.
Received View 2: Lexical items enter syntax by means of a rule of lexical insertion that inserts them into D-structure. This rule substitutes a lexical item for a terminal element (a lexical or X0 category) in a phrase-structure tree. This view goes back to Syntactic Structures (Chomsky (1957)) and Aspects (Chomsky (1965)). It creates a problem for idioms, which are not X0 categories.
Received View 3: The semantic interpretation of syntactic structures is performed compositionally after lexical insertion (at D-structure in the Standard Theory, at S-structure in the Extended Standard Theory [EST], and at Logical Form [LF] in Government-Binding [GB] and current Minimalist Theory). This too raises a problem for idioms: How are they marked at the time of lexical insertion so that they receive noncompositional interpretations at this later stage?
Received View 4: A lexical entry includes only information that cannot be predicted by rules. All redundancies among lexical items are extracted and encoded in lexical rules.
