Types of lexical information¹

The Lexicon

A lexicon viewed as part of the apparatus of a generative grammar must make accessible to its users, for each lexical item,

(i) the nature of the deep-structure syntactic environments into which the item may be inserted;

(ii) the properties of the item to which the rules of grammar are sensitive;

(iii) for an item that can be used as a ‘ predicate ’, the number of ‘ arguments ’ that it conceptually requires;

(iv) the role(s) which each argument plays in the situation which the item, as predicate, can be used to indicate;

(v) the presuppositions or ‘happiness conditions’ for the use of the item, the conditions which must be satisfied in order for the item to be used ‘ aptly ’;

(vi) the nature of the conceptual or morphological relatedness of the item to other items in the lexicon;

(vii) its meaning; and

(viii) the phonological or orthographic shapes which the item assumes under given grammatical conditions.

In this paper I shall survey, in a very informal manner, the various types of information that needs to be included, in one way or another, in the lexical component of an adequate grammar. I shall, however, have nothing to say about (viii) above, and nothing very reliable to say about (vii).

¹ Sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation through Grant GN-534.1 from the Office of Science Information Service to the Computer and Information Science Research Center, the Ohio State University.