Deriving the Two-Argument Restriction Without Recursion

Abstract

It is a universal property of argument structure that verbs cannot take more than three arguments –one external and two internal (Hale K, Keyser SJ, On argument structure and the lexical expression of syntactic relations. In: Hale K, Keyser J (eds) The view from Building 20: essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger. MIT, Cambridge, 2002, henceforth H&K); any additional (pseudo)arguments are introduced via (possibly recursive) syntactic or discursive procedures, not lexical. This is the Two (internal) Argument Restriction (TAR), which is part of the basic architecture of natural language. It is argued that a modified version of the theory presented in H&K can account for this restriction. In this proposal, the TAR crucially depends on the lack of recursion in the lexicon (in building argument structures), thereby restricting the possibility of using this formal mechanism to the domain of sentential syntax (building of sentences). Argument structures are thus built in a cyclic and directional way, and without recursion.