Lexical semantics
[4] They fall into a narrow range of meanings (semantic fields) and can combine with each other to generate new denotations.
Homonymy refers to the relationship between words that are spelled or pronounced the same way but hold different meanings.
The words boil, bake, fry, and roast, for example, would fall under the larger semantic category of cooking.
Take, for example, a taxonomy of plants and animals: it is possible to understand the words rose and rabbit without knowing what a marigold or a muskrat is.
A semantic field can thus be very large or very small, depending on the level of contrast being made between lexical items.
[11] Event structure has three primary components:[12] Verbs can belong to one of three types: states, processes, or transitions.
[13] Lexicalist theories became popular during the 1980s, and emphasized that a word's internal structure was a question of morphology and not of syntax.
[13] The following is an example of a lexical entry for the verb put: Lexicalist theories state that a word's meaning is derived from its morphology or a speaker's lexicon, and not its syntax.
This allowed syntacticians to hypothesize that lexical items with complex syntactic features (such as ditransitive, inchoative, and causative verbs), could select their own specifier element within a syntax tree construction.
This brought the focus back on the syntax-lexical semantics interface; however, syntacticians still sought to understand the relationship between complex verbs and their related syntactic structure, and to what degree the syntax was projected from the lexicon, as the Lexicalist theories argued.
In the mid 1990s, linguists Heidi Harley, Samuel Jay Keyser, and Kenneth Hale addressed some of the implications posed by complex verbs and a lexically-derived syntax.
Their proposals indicated that the predicates CAUSE and BECOME, referred to as subunits within a Verb Phrase, acted as a lexical semantic template.
[18] The recursion found under the "umbrella" Verb Phrase, the VP Shell, accommodated binary-branching theory; another critical topic during the 1990s.
[13] Kenneth Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser introduced their thesis on lexical argument structure during the early 1990s.
Based on the interaction between lexical properties, locality, and the properties of the EPP (where a phrasal head selects another phrasal element locally), Hale and Keyser make the claim that the Specifier position or a complement are the only two semantic relations that project a predicate's argument.
In 2003, Hale and Keyser put forward this hypothesis and argued that a lexical unit must have one or the other, Specifier or Complement, but cannot have both.
[22] This theory views the syntactic structure of words as a result of morphology and semantics, instead of the morpho-semantic interface being predicted by the syntax.
[23] The following is an example of the tree structure proposed by distributed morphology for the sentence "John's destroying the city".
This branching ensures that the Specifier is the consistently subject, even when investigating the projection of a complex verb's lexical entry and its corresponding syntactic construction.
Ramchand also introduced the concept of Homomorphic Unity, which refers to the structural synchronization between the head of a complex verb phrase and its complement.
"[24] The unaccusative hypothesis was put forward by David Perlmutter in 1987, and describes how two classes of intransitive verbs have two different syntactic structures.
Linguist Martin Haspelmath classifies inchoative/causative verb pairs under three main categories: causative, anticausative, and non-directed alternations.
As seen in the underlying tree structure for (3a), the silent subunit BECOME is embedded within the Verb Phrase (VP), resulting in the inchoative change-of-state meaning (y become z).
While this debate is still unresolved in languages such as Italian, French, and Greek, it has been suggested by linguist Florian Schäfer that there are semantic differences between marked and unmarked inchoatives in German.
'Richard Kayne proposed the idea of unambiguous paths as an alternative to c-commanding relationships, which is the type of structure seen in examples (8).
The Double Object Construction presented in 1988 gave clear evidence of a hierarchical structure using asymmetrical binary branching.
The original structural hypothesis was that of ternary branching seen in (9a) and (9b), but following from Kayne's 1981 analysis, Larson maintained that each complement is introduced by a verb.
Larson proposed that both sentences in (9a) and (9b) share the same underlying structure and the difference on the surface lies in that the double object construction "John sent Mary a package" is derived by transformation from a NP plus PP construction "John sent a package to Mary".
Beck and Johnson show that the object in (15a) has a different relation to the motion verb as it is not able to carry the meaning of HAVING which the possessor (9a) and (15a) can.
Further evidence for the structural existence of VP shells with an invisible verbal unit is given in the application of the adjunct or modifier "again".
