5.1.2. The Mapping from Lexical Semantics to Syntax

It is very difficult to separate the issues that pertain to the lexical semantic representation from the issues relating to the mapping from lexical semantics to syntax. The reason is that the mapping is largely dependent on the particular representation adopted. In the previous section, for some of the approaches, it was inevitable to specify how the mapping into some of the grammatical relations operated. In this section, Levin and Rappaport’s (1996) taxonomy of the methods generally employed to obtain the syntactic representation of clauses from the semantic of the verbs will be presented.

All such methods assume that the syntactic realization of the arguments of a verb is largely predictable from its lexical semantics. In the generative tradition this belief is embodied in the following hypotheses:

(5.40) Universal Alignment Hypothesis:

There exist principles of UG which predict the initial [grammatical] relation borne by each nominal in a given clause from the meaning of the clause. (Perlmutter and Postal 1984: 97)

(5.41) The Little Alignment Hypothesis:

For any one predicate in any one language, there is a fixed mapping which aligns each semantic role with an initial GR. The alignment remains invariant for all clauses with that predicate. (Rosen 1984: 53)