Abstract
To learn a language, we must learn the words of the language, and in addition its principles of sentence structure. For many years linguists have considered these two tasks to be quite different. However, in recent years linguistic research within quite diverse frameworks has been converging on the idea that sentence structure is to a large extent a reflection of the properties of lexical items. Within the theoretical framework which has developed since the publication of Chomsky’s (1981) Lectures on Government and Binding, and which is at present often referred to as the Principles and Parameters approach, most linguists are of the opinion that at D-structure all arguments in the theta-grid are projected to positions which are dominated by a projection of the verb (or some other lexical category). In a full-fledged sentence, the verb projection in its turn is the complement of a functional head.1
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Platzack, C. (1992). Functional Categories and Early Swedish. In: Meisel, J.M. (eds) The Acquisition of Verb Placement. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2803-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2803-2_3
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