STUDY OF LEXICAL SEMANTICS BASED ON X'-SEMANTICS

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

1. I argue about the problem concerning the correlation between meanings of verbs and their complement sentence selection, that is, whether we can predict, on the basis of the substantive semantics of verbs, what type of complement sentence they can select, and find out the close correlation between the semantics of complement sentence-taking verbs and the types of complement sentences. I also provide a semantic account of the differences and similarities of factive and semi-factive predicates.2. Some verbs taking complement sentences require their complement sentence to be of the form V-NP-to-VP.They can be classified into three types, want-type verbs, persuade-type verbs, and believe-type verbs, in terms of certain criteria. However, if these criteria are applied to verbs like allow, permit, force, order, etc., conflicting results are obtained. However, these problems are solved if these verbs are classified as ECM type verbs like believe and a certain rule of inference.3. Minimalist grammars, unlike GB grammars, are so constructed as to generate only grammatical sentences. This idea gives birth to the strong thesis that the computational component makes no errors in every step of derivation. To implement this thesis the Earliness Principle is proposed that claims that licensing should be done as early as possible. Since the strong thesis allows no misapplication of movements, traditional conditions on movements like the Subjacency Condition and CED should be eliminated from the computational component. Ungrammatical sentences that are claimed to have been ruled out by these island conditions are just underivable sentences. And island effects, if any, should be accounted for by perceptual strategies, pragmatic principles, or semantic or phonological principles.