The relationship between the meaning of words and the structure of sentences is an important area of research in linguistics. Studying the connections between lexical conceptual meaning and event structural relations, this book arrives at a modular classification of verb types within English and across languages. Ramchand argues that lexical encyclopedic content and event structural aspects of meaning need to be systematically distinguished, and that thematic and aspectual relations belong to the latter domain of meaning. The book proposes a syntactic decompositional view of core verbal meaning, and sets out to account for the variability and systematicity of argument structure realisation across verb types. It also proposes an interesting view of lexical insertion.

In this article, we argue that, under current conceptions of the architecture of the grammar, apparentwh-dependencies can, in principle, arise from either a movement or a base-generation strategy, where Agree establishes the syntactic connection in the latter case. The crucial diagnostics are not locality effects, but identity effects. We implement the base-generation analysis using a small set of semantically interpretable features, together with a simple universal syntax-semantics correspondence. We show that parametric variation arises because of the different ways the features are bundled on functional heads. We further argue that it is the bundling of two features on a single lexical item, together with the correspondence that requires them to be interpreted apart, that is responsible for the displacement property of human languages.

In this article, we argue that a structural distinction between predicational and equative copular clauses is illusory. All semantic predicational relationships are constructed asymmetrically via a syntactic predicational head; differences reduce to whether this head bears an event variable or not. This allows us to maintain a restrictive view of the syntax-semantics interface in the face of apparently recalcitrant data from Scottish Gaelic.

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There is a tension between Chomsky's recent Minimalist theory and the cartographic program initiated by Cinque. Cinque's cartography argues for a large number of finegrained categories organized in one or more universal Rich Functional Hierarchies (RFH). The subtlety of the evidence and the richness of the inventory virtually force an innatist approach. In contrast, Chomsky argues for a minimal role for UG (MUG), shifting the burden to extralinguistic cognition, learning, and what he calls third factor principles such as principles of efficient computation. In this paper we reconcile the austere MUG vision of Chomsky with the impressive empirical evidence that Cinque and others have presented for RFH. We argue (building on previous work) that some Cartographic work overstates the universality of the orders observed, and furthermore conflates several different sources of ordering. Ordering sources include scope, polarity, and semantic category. Once these factors are properly understood, there remains an irreduceable universal functional hierarchy, for example that which orders epistemic modality and tense over root modality and aspect, and that which orders the latter over argument structure and Aktionsart (as discussed in much previous work). This residual core functional hierarchy (CFH) is unexplained so far by work which follows MUG. Rather than simply stipulating the CFH as part of UG, we reconcile CFH with MUG by detailing what nonlinguistic cognition must look like in order for MUG to derive the CFH. We furthermore show how an individual language develops a languagespecific RFH which is consistent with the universal CFH, illustrating with a detailed account of the English auxiliary system.