Syntactic Dualism

Stephen Wechsler, University of Texas

Syntactic dualism (or 'lexicalism', under one use of that term) refers
to the conception of syntax as organized according to two components:
(1) the lexicon, a structured set of formatives ('words'); and (2)
combinatory syntax and semantics, i.e. rules for combining those
formatives into utterances.  This talk defends syntactic dualism
against current challenges to it, and draws lessons concerning the
interface of the formal syntax with the conceptual system.   The
count/mass properties of nouns can be mostly explained in terms of
features of concepts-- features that ipso facto become features of a
noun if the concept corresponds to the noun's meaning.  But nouns can
be shown to also have grammatical count/mass features (pace Borer
2004).  Moving to verbs, the evidence for formal structure of lexical
entries becomes even stronger.  Evidence for lexical argument
structure (and hence against the 'syntactic neo-davidsonian' model of
Marantz, Borer, inter alia) can be found in word derivation processes
that can be shown to preserve that structure systematically.  Finally,
words represent the smallest level of granularity for contextual
polysemy effects, which is expected on the dualist view but not if
word meanings are composed in the syntax.