The interface is conceived of very differently informalist andfunctionalist approaches. While functionalists tend to look into semantics and pragmatics for explanations of syntactic phenomena, formalists try to limit such explanations within syntax itself.[9] Aside from syntax, other aspects of grammar have been studied in terms of how they interact with semantics; which can be observed by the existence of terms such asmorphosyntax–semantics interface.[3]
Withinfunctionalist approaches, research on the syntax–semantics interface has been aimed at disproving the formalist argument of theautonomy of syntax, by finding instances of semantically determined syntactic structures.[4][10]
Levin and Rappaport Hovav, in their 1995 monograph, reiterated that there are some aspects of verb meaning that are relevant to syntax, and others that are not, as previously noted bySteven Pinker.[11][12] Levin and Rappaport Hovav isolated such aspects focusing on the phenomenon ofunaccusativity that is "semantically determined and syntactically encoded".[13]
Van Valin andLaPolla, in their 1997 monographic study, found that the more semantically motivated or driven a syntactic phenomenon is, the more it tends to be typologically universal, that is, to show less cross-linguistic variation.[14]
Informal semantics,semantic interpretation is viewed as amapping from syntactic structures todenotations. There are several formal views of the syntax–semantics interface which differ in what they take to be the inputs and outputs of this mapping. In theHeim and Kratzer model commonly adopted withingenerative linguistics, the input is taken to be a special level of syntactic representation calledlogical form. At logical form, semantic relationships such asscope andbinding are represented unambiguously, having been determined by syntactic operations such asquantifier raising. Other formal frameworks take the opposite approach, assuming that such relationships are established by the rules of semantic interpretation themselves. In such systems, the rules include mechanisms such astype shifting anddynamic binding.[1][15][16][2]
Before the 1950s, there was no discussion of a syntax–semantics interface inAmerican linguistics, since neither syntax nor semantics was an active area of research.[17] This neglect was due in part to the influence oflogical positivism andbehaviorism in psychology, that viewed hypotheses about linguistic meaning as untestable.[17][18]
By the 1960s, syntax had become a major area of study, and some researchers began examining semantics as well. In this period, the most prominent view of the interface was theKatz–Postal Hypothesis according to whichdeep structure was the level of syntactic representation which underwent semantic interpretation. This assumption was upended by data involving quantifiers, which showed thatsyntactic transformations can affect meaning. During thelinguistics wars, a variety of competing notions of the interface were developed, many of which live on in present-day work.[17][2]
^Since the 1970s, as a response to syntactic-oriented approaches like Chomsky's generativism, the assumption underlying many studies onlexical semantics has been that "syntactic properties of phrases reflect, in large part, the meanings of the words that head them" (Levin& Pinker, 1992)
Levin, B., &Pinker, S. (1992) Introduction in Beth Levin & Steven Pinker (1992, Eds) Lexical & conceptual semantics. (A Cognition Special Issue) Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Pp. 244.
Pinker, S. (1989)Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. New edition in 2013:Learnability and Cognition, new edition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure. MIT press.
Taylor, J. (2017)Lexical Semantics. In B. Dancygier (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics, pp. 246–261). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.doi:10.1017/9781316339732.017
Tenny, C. (1994). Aspectual roles and the syntax-semantics interface (Vol. 52). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Vendler, Z. (1957)Verbs and times inThe Philosophical Review 66(2): 143–160. Reprinted as ch. 4 ofLinguistics and Philosophy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1967, pp. 97–121.
Yi, E., & Koenig, J. P. (2016)Why verb meaning matters to syntax, in Fleischhauer, J., Latrouite, A., & Osswald, R. (2016)Explorations of the syntax-semantics interface (pp. 57–76). düsseldorf university press.
