ABSTRACT
In this chapter I model the lexicon-syntax interface by defining it on event-semantic lexical primitives: the number of participants that are involved in the event denoted by a verb and the verb's basic event type. The mapping system only needs to "see" these lexical properties in order to relate a verb's lexical specification and the syntactic configuration it appears in. I will argue that the need to identify event structure defines the mapping relation: mapping involves checking of event-semantic features in the syntactic configuration, rather than the association of lexical arguments with syntactic positions. I call this approach the CHESS model (checking event-semantic structure). Arguments in the specifier positions of AgrS and AgrO identify an event or subevent by being associated with participants in the event structure. Telicity features must be checked off in object position via strong Case assignment in AgrO. As telicity is determined by the event-structural properties of the VP predicate to which a verb's lexical event structure contributes compositionally, the event feature checking approach to mapping accounts for the aspectual nature of the mapping generalizations in a natural way. Furthermore, this approach explains the phenomenon of lexical-syntactic flexibility as a derivative of event type-shifting. Argument-centered views on mapping (i.e., theories based on θ-roles, argument structures or lexical-conceptual structures), on the other hand, cannot account for the effects of event type-shifts that determine lexical-syntactic flexibility, since they define mapping solely on a verb's lexical arguments.
