Consequences of a Theory of Structural Limits on Argument Structure

ABSTRACT: In this talk I address the following question: how do we explain the limited set of argument structure types observed in natural language? My work inserts itself within the approach to argument structure presented in Hale and Keyser (2002), whose main purpose is to ascertain the role that structural factors alone play in the observed behavior of lexical items. In such theory, the different argument structure types attested crosslinguistically are restricted by the combination of primitive lexical categories defined solely by their structural properties. I point out that the restrictive power of this theory as it appears is undermined by allowing unrestricted recursive combination of such primitive units. My work is devoted to show that by eliminating this type of lexical recursion, this problem disappears. The question however arises of whether all argument structure types can be accounted for without recursion, especially the ones that needed it to start with. I argue that such is the case, and show it with an example. Finally, I speculate on the consequences the resulting theory has in predicting a limited number of argument structure types to be found crosslinguistically. 0. An Observation About Verb