I will briefly discuss several pertinent aspects of GB. First, government is a relationship between elements in a phrase structure tree. An element A can be said to govern another element B if A is a head, and A c-commands B. A c-commands B if the minimal maximal projection dominating A also dominates B. Government is closely tied in with the notion of complementation.
Complement NPs, as semantic arguments of the verb, bear q-roles assigned by the
latter. The Projection Principle, as stated in Roberts (1985, p.29) ensures that these are always assigned:
(120) The thematic properties of lexical items must be preserved at all syntactic levels.
Selkirk (1982) and others have proposed a type of XP structure for morphologically complex words. Such words have a head, which is of the same syntactic category as its mother, with a particular subcategorization frame. This forms a type of head-complement relation between an affix and its stem, analogous to syntactic constituents.
Languages are thought to be comprised of a system of universal principles and a set of parameters which differ according to the needs of specific languages. Parameters are set (or "triggered") by language learners during acquisition, depending on their linguistic environment.
Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar is a supremely lexical approach to grammatical theory based on a formal theory of features and a set of principles which indicate how categorial information can be combined syntactically (Riehemann). Abstract structures are avoided as much as possible, and rich lexical information is organized in terms of hierarchies. Lexical rules allow complex properties of words to be derived from the logic of the lexicon.
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