A Theory of Predicates

Lexicalism is a theory of information associated with words and what exactly a word is.

The authors propose a different idea of what can be contained in words.

Lexicalism is first and foremost a hypothesis about functional-semantic information and secondly a hypothesis about the formal expression of this information.

Grammar rules cannot change the argument structure of words.

Any change to the meaning of words must occur in the lexicon.

A new lexical theory of complex predicates is proposed in this volume.

The authors argue that previous lexicalist accounts within Lexical Functional Grammar and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar have abandoned certain crucial aspects of lexicalism in their efforts to account for analytically-expressed predicates, in particular permitting predicate-formation operations to occur within phrase structure.

Although the theory is presented in detail primarily for German expressions of these predicates, consideration is given to cross-linguistic application of this theory.