Aspects of Sentence Structure Extension by Functional Categories and Adjuncts from the Perspective of the Syntax-Semantics Interface

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The purpose of this research project is to investigate how functional categories and adjuncts participate in the processes in which nuclear propositional syntactic objects consisting of predicates and their arguments develop into larger syntactic objects, from the perspective of the syntax-semantics interface. The main findings of the research are the following three points. (1) Functional categories extend sentence structures in accordance with the inherent syntactic and/or semantic properties of their heads, and semantic interpretation is carried out in parallel with syntactic derivation, as demonstrated in Kaneko (2006) and Kaneko (2007a) with special reference to temporal interpretation of a variety of clauses. (2) Kaneko (2008a) shows that adjuncts can be adjoined to maximal and intermediate projections in terms of Merge, and both types of adjunction can be analyzed as instances of Merge targeting "maximal" projections, because under the theory of Bare Phrase Structure of Chomsky (1995), projections are defined relationally and derivationally and they are always "maximal" as targets of the operation Merge. (3) Kaneko (2006) and Kaneko (2008b) demonstrate that locality and configuration factors are involved in the process of connecting adjuncts and what they modify (especially, functional heads).Furthermore, Kaneko (2007b) points out a number of problems with current educational grammar in the treatment of syntactic expansion by embedding and ellipsis phenomena licensed by functional categories, and argues that we need introduce to educational grammar the concept of constituency, the basic insights of the X'-Theory, the distinction between grammatical relations and categories, and so on.