Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution

e. shh, psst, tsk-tsk

f. abracadabra, hocus-pocus

g. bow-wow, cockadoodledoo

Unlike ordinary words, these can be used on their own as meaningful utterances. Moreover, they cannot be combined
with other words into sentences.^60

Thereare also wordsthathavephonology and syntaxbut nosemantics, for instancetheitinIt's hot in hereand thedoof
do-support (I didn't like him), which is present just to carry the Tense. In some theories of syntax there are lexical items
thathavesyntax and semantics but no phonology, for instancemainstream generativetheory's“emptypronoun”PRO
that serves as the subject of infinitives;in this approach,Bill tried to talkis taken to have the syntacticstructureBill tried
[PRO to talk]. Finally, there are some words(?) that are just stored pieces of phonology lacking both syntax and
meaning, for example nonsense refrains like those in (26), used tofill up metrical structure in songs and nursery
rhymes.

(26) fiddle-de-dee,hey-diddle-diddle,hickory-dickory-dock, eenie-meenieminie-moe,she-bop-she-bop, rikiti-tikiti-

tin, ink-a-dink-a-doo

This notion of“defective”lexical items will play a crucial role in Chapters 6 and 8.

With this view of the architecture of grammar in place, we take up one aspect of the syntax–semantics interface in
some detail.

5.8 Introduction to argument structure

This section and the next sketch the theory of argument structure, one of the most central topics in every version of
grammatical theory. My goal here is to illustrate the complexity of this aspect of the syntax–semantics interface. My
account draws on many analyses in the literature, but it comes out somewhat differently from any of them, partly as a
consequence ofbeing abletotake a larger perspectiveon the problem.For themost part I willrefrain from theoretical
commitments: like Chapter 1, these sections are meant primarily as an illustration of the complexity of the
phenomenon, enumerating facts that everyone essentially agrees on.

The domain of the lexicon where argument structure is most important is verbs. Consider the verbdevour.For
somethingto be an act of devouring,some character has to be cramming some other character (or some stuff) into its
mouth. We will call these characters the“semantic arguments”of the verb; we

132 ARCHITECTURAL FOUNDATIONS

(^60) They can, however, appear within direct quotes, where there are no syntactic constraints: here even phrases of a different language are possible. As quotes they can also be
used as nouns,as inhis loud hello. But thisis possible withany word, e.g.his frequent howevers. Someanimal sounds such asmeow, moo, andoink can double as verbs, but the
ones in (25g) cannot.