Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution

(ff) #1

encodes standard constituent structure and f-structure encodes grammatical relations. Autolexical Syntax (Fig. 5.5b)
elaborates syntax differently, withindependent phrasal and morphological components. Role and ReferenceGrammar
(Fig. 5.5c) pairs the two subcomponents of Autolexical Syntax with two subcomponents of semantics, argument
structure (who did what to whom) and information structure (topic/focus organization); interfaces go in every
direction among them. I should also mention an early antecedent: Sydney Lamb's (1966) Stratificational Grammar,
whatever its drawbacks, offered a parallel architecture carried through the entire organization of the grammar.


In Chapter 12 we will work out our own elaborations of the semantic component and its interfaces; a somewhat more
elaborate version of the syntactic component will be suggested in section 5.10. Here I confine myself to a remark on
one important elaboration of syntactic structure.


Figs. 5.5a 5.5b and 5.5c suggest a division between phrasal syntax and morphosyntax. As observed in section 3.3.1,
words, like phrases, can be built up hierarchically as tree structures. (23) illustrates.


As has been oftenremarked (e.g. Aronoff 1976, Selkirk 1982, Di Sciullo and Williams 1987, Beard 1987, Lieber 1992,
as well as Sadock 1991 and Van Valin and LaPolla 1997), the principles of hierarchical structure inside words are
somewhat different from those for phrases.



  • Morphological structures are mostly created by adding closed-class items (affixes and clitics) to open-class
    stems (nouns, verbs, adjectives); phrases are built primarily of open-class items.


128 ARCHITECTURAL FOUNDATIONS

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