occur in lexical semantics. For instance,brotherandsisterexpress the same kinship function but differ in the modifier
MALE VS. FEMALE. Moregenerally, anylexicaldecompositionintoa list ofindependentfeatures can treatthese features
as separate modifiers.
As for lambda extraction, recall (section 11.9) what the agentiveand telic qualia in a noun's meaning encode: how the
object comes into being and what it does. For instance, the telic quale ofwaitresssays that it is someone who serves
food to someone. But just to list the activity of serving as part of the meaning ofwaitresswould not say whether the
waitress is the person doing the serving, the person being served, or even the food. Lambda extraction provides just
thedeviceweneed topickoutthecorrectcharacterinthisactivity. Itispreciselyparalleltothelambdaextractioninthe
relative clause of the paraphrase“person who serves food to someone.”Customer,‘person being served,’has a similar
Event in its modifier but lambda extraction over a different variable.
Let us return for a moment to the issue of definitions discussed in section 11.2. These three devices of
composition—variable satisfaction, modification, and lambda extraction—are present in both lexical and phrasal
semantics. Thus, to the extent that a word's meaning is built up using only these devices, it can be straightforwardly
defined; a fairly good example isapproach=‘go toward.’On theother hand, to the extent that a word's meaning uses a
principle of lexical composition that lacks a phrasal parallel, for example a system of cluster conditions, a good
definition will be impossible. This incomplete overlap seems to be a basic design feature of language: the interface
principles that can“see” syntactic combinations in working memory map into a more limited range of semantic
combinations than do the principles that can“see”lexical items.^202
12.2 Enriched composition
The principles of composition in the preceding section, in conjunction with the general linking principles of section
5.9, yield the default relation between syntactic and conceptual structure: a close correspondence between the
configurations of lexical items insyntaxand conceptual structure. I havetermedthese principles“simplecomposition”
(Jackendoff 1997a).
However, we have already noticed that even this default relation is not entirely tight. For instance, modifiers often
attach not to their host as a whole but to
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(^202) Note that the broader set of lexical semantic combinations is available not only to word-sized items but also to phrase-sized items such as idioms and constructions.