Headless Constructions and Coercion by Construction

Among the many relations which play a role in syntactic and semantic generalizations one has carried a unique historic burden as the regulator of interaction between the two levels: that of head. While the canon of heads has been expanded to include an array of nonlexical categories, as in the functional projections of the minimalist program (see, e.g., Marantz 1995, Radford 1997), syntactic theorists have not traditionally questioned the centrality of heads to the syntax-semantics mapping: heads license complements, adjuncts and specifiers; they thereby determine the allowable expansions of the syntactic categories to which they belong. Licensing relationships are accordingly assumed to be sisterhood relationships. Under this assumption, there are no properties of the syntax-semantics interface which cannot be described by phrase-structure rules like those in (1):

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