Prolegomenon to a Theory of Argument Structure (review)

This volume represents the culmination of a lengthy and rewarding collaboration between Ken Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser. Unfortunately, Ken Hale passed away two months after the completion of the text. Undoubtedly, some of the minor rough spots in the discussion and analysis would have been more polished if he were still with us. As the title indicates, this book serves as an introduction to a particular theory of argument structure. Their central claim is that the behaviour of lexical items can be explained with a minimal set of principles, and that lexical items project a syntactic structure defined over only two relations: complement and specifier. The remainder of this review discusses each chapter in detail followed by some critical notes.

The first chapter introduces the basic conception of argument structure that forms the foundation of this volume. The authors present a rather sharpened notion of argument structure, indicating that the structure projected by a lexical item is based on information from the lexicon.

Denominal and deadjectival verbs form the basis of the majority of the discussion in this chapter. The key idea is that a lexical root "conflates" with an empty or nearly empty verbal head to form a verb:

(1)

In (1), the adjectival root black conflates with verbal head -en to form blacken.

The other key concept presented in this chapter is that there are two fundamental relations in argument structure: the head-complement relation and the spec-head relation. These two relations give rise to four structural types of lexical argument structure: a head which needs a complement (such as a verb), a head which needs a specifier (such as an adjective), a head which needs both (such as a preposition), and a head which needs neither (such as a noun). With these concepts, the authors introduce synthetic verbs, which merge two of the structural types just discussed. Sentences such as The screen cleared are derived from the adjective clear and an empty verbal head, in the same manner discussed for example (1). Here, the empty verbal head creates the specifier position that the adjective needs, and the adjective fills the complement position that the verb needs.

The remainder of this chapter discusses how to prevent transitive versions of intransitive verbs from converging (i.e., The clown laughed the children) and introduces some of the topics to be discussed in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 2 concerns various types of transitivity alternations found in English, following the framework introduced in the previous chapter. One such transitivity alternation is found with the verbs splash and smear. Whereas splash freely alternates between the transitive and intransitive, smear is barred from appearing in the intransitive:

(2) The pigs splashed mud on the wall.                               (p. 31, ex. 1a)

(3) Mud splashed on the wall.                                         (p. 31, ex. 1b)

(4) Leecil smeared saddle soap on my chaps.                          (p. 31, ex. 4a)

(5) *Saddle soap smeared on my chaps.                               (p. 31, ex. 4b)

Hale and Keyser attribute this variation to the merge order of the constituents for verbs such as splash versus verbs such as smear. In (3), the verb merges directly with the partial P constituent on the wall. The verb then projects the specifier position required by the preposition to host the theme argument mud. This option is not available for verbs such as smear. The authors go on to discuss what property distinguishes verbs such as splash and verbs such as smear. They suggest that verbs such as smear require an "agent-manner adverbial feature", which binds the verb in question. In the intransitive version of smear in example (5), there is no adverbial feature to bind the verb so the derivation fails. Other transitive/intransitive asymmetries are discussed and explained, thus allowing the authors to maintain their proposal that the availability of transitivity alternations is due to argument structure.

The third chapter deals with the notion of conflation, which the authors...