Lexiconsyntax

Lexiconsyntax is a field at the interface between the lexicon, the mental repository of words, and syntax, the set of rules governing sentence structure. It studies how lexical information encoded in word entries—such as part of speech, subcategorization frames, argument structure, selectional restrictions, and idiomatic potential—governs the grammatical realization of those items in language.

Theoretically, lexiconsyntax posits that lexemes carry more than simple category labels; they embed information that constrains possible syntactic configurations. Verbs may specify required arguments and their shapes, while adjectives may restrict the nouns they modify. Idioms and multiword expressions illustrate how fixed lexicalized units can participate in syntax as single units despite containing multiple lexical elements.

Different linguistic frameworks model the interface in varying ways. Lexical-Functional Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, for example, attach rich lexical information to entries to guide syntactic structure, while Construction Grammar treats constructions as form-meaning pairings that inherently couple lexicon and syntax. In computational linguistics, lexicon-syntax information supports parsing and natural-language generation; resources such as rich lexical databases and frame-based resources (e.g., FrameNet) encode subcategorization and event structure to improve accuracy.

Cross-linguistic variation, polysemy, and idiomaticity pose ongoing challenges. Research aims to develop more dynamic, integrative representations that combine lexical semantics with syntactic realization, including data-driven models and principled rule-based accounts.