In Search of the Origins of the Lexical Syntactic Categories : a Comparative Study of Japanese and English

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Syntactic structure, or LF, is generated by a single generative system and a structure homomorphic to it is interpreted compositionally by semantics. Each vocabulary item(VI) is a bundle of (1) unpredictable phonological information, (2) unpredictable semantic (encyclopedic) information, and specifications for its association with complex syntactic structures. The labels for open-class VIs, verb(V)/noun(N)/adjective(A), can be considered to be a diacritic for this "environment of insertion." Because of the homomorphism between the LF and its interpretation, a verb is interpreted to be a predicate of an eventuality with a specification of its participants and a noun (root) is interpreted to be the name of a kind of entity. The existence of three lexical categories, V/N/A, may very well originate from the innate human conceptual propensity to focus on and identify eventualities/entities/and properties of entities in perceiving the world.