Abstract for Robert Van Valin's talk

Lexical rules, co-composition and linking syntax and semantics
Robert Van Valin (University at Buffalo, SUNY)
February 22, 2007 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - ; Room 6417, The CUNY Graduate Center

A fundamental issue dividing theories of the syntax-semantics interface is whether the se mantic representation of clauses is projected from the lexical representation of the verb which determines to a large extent the syntactic structure of the clause or whether it is constructed or composed based on the NPs and PPs co-occurring with the verb in a clause; in the latter view, the verb has a very general or underspecified meaning. The first approach mentioned above, which has been dubbed the 'projectionist approach,' has been advanced by Foley & Van Valin (1984), Pinker (1989), Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995), Rappaport Hovav & Levin (1998), Van Valin (1993, 2005), and Van Valin & LaPolla (1997), among others, while the second, which has been termed the 'constructionist approach,' has been championed by Goldberg (1995), Pustejovsky (1995) and Michaelis & Ruppenhofer (2001), among others. The two approaches have often been viewed as conflicting and incompatible with each other, but in this paper it will be argued that they are in fact complementary and therefore not necessarily in conflict with each other. In the discussion, the projectionist view will be represented by Role and Reference Grammar [RRG] (Van Valin, 1993, 2005; Van Valin & LaPolla, 1997) and its theory of semantic representation and theory of linking between syntax and semantics, and the constructionist perspective will be represented by the Generative Lexicon [GL] theory and in particular its notion of co-composition (Pustejovsky, 1995, 1998).