Linguistic Evidence for the Two Strategies of Lexical Decomposition

Abstract

It is not merely for semantic reasons that the classical GS theory postulates a level of underlying structure at which words are decomposed, but also because it is explicitly argued that these decomposed structures are of the same general form as English syntactic structures and that the same set of operations, namely transformations (or “derivational constraints” if preferred), is responsible for successive stages of the deep-to-surface mapping before as well as after lexical insertion. In this chapter I will examine the arguments that have been presented for this position, determine what modifications must be made in the “inverted generative semantics” model of decomposition to accommodate the data on which these arguments are based, and evaluate the overall success with which this data is treated in the two methods under consideration. I will first consider briefly four kinds of putative syntactic arguments for decomposition found in the literature that I do not find to be serious contenders for persuasive arguments at all, then turn to arguments of a more compelling nature.