Schreiner, Sylvia L.R. (In press). The syntax-semantics/pragmatics interface. For A. Carnie, Y. Sato, and D. Siddiqi, eds. Routledge Handbook of Syntax. London: Routledge. 1. INTRODUCTION A number of phenomena important to our understanding of the structures and meanings of natural language lie at the juncture between the two. This overview considers the major phenomena at the interface between syntax and semantics/pragmatics, as well as the major theoretical questions that have arisen around these phenomena and around the interface itself. There is only an interface to talk about between syntax and semantics inasmuch as the two are considered to be separate components (as has generally been the case in the generative tradition). We can talk about this “interface” in at least two ways: on the one hand, we can talk about the location in a model of language competence and/or performance where the syntactic and semantic modules meet and interact. On the other hand, we can talk about phenomena that seem to be driven by both syntactic and semantic mechanisms or principles. Both perspectives will be considered here. Studies of phenomena at the interface seek to answer questions such as the following: Does each part of a syntactic structure play an equal role in determining the meaning? Which parts of the meaning have overt reflexes in the structure? Can the overall meaning be easily deduced from the summed meaning of the parts? And, which kinds of meaning are instantiated with a piece of morphosyntax, and which merely have a syntactic effect (i.e. on ordering relations, co-occurrence restrictions, limitations on movement, etc.)? Several approaches to overarching versions of these questions are discussed there. This article is structured as follows: Section 2 presents some of the major issues at the interface between syntax and semantics, with special attention paid to compositionality, theta theory, and functional heads; the final subsection is devoted to phenomena at the interface with pragmatics. Section 3 describes major models of the interface in syntactic and semantic theory, with the last subsection focusing on approaches to the interface(s) with pragmatics. Section 4 concludes and suggests avenues for future work. 2. ISSUES AT THE INTERFACE OF SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS Here I present some of the major topics that seem to occur naturally at the syntax-semantics interface, along with examples of work in each area. 2.1 Interpretation and compositionality The issue that underlies most if not all work at the syntax-semantics interface is how to arrive at the meaning of a structure. Many approaches have come to the same conclusion: that the structure is built first, and the meaning is then obtained from the structure in one way or another. This is the case in the Principles & Parameters framework in general (from Deep Structures, Surface Structures, or Logical Form), and in the Minimalist Program (from LF), but not, for instance, in Muskens’ (2001) non-compositional λ-grammar account (in which semantics is strictly parallel to syntax, rather than secondary to it in any way). In Lexical Functional Grammar, as well, syntactic and semantic levels of representation exist in parallel with mappings between them; meaning is read from the semantic representation. In mainstream generative syntax, the basic picture of the grammar has been one in which the syntax is responsible for building structures, and the semantics is responsible for assigning interpretations to those structures. In early views (the “Standard Theory”), syntactic Deep Structures were the input to the semantics. (In Generative Semantics, on the other hand, the interpretations were actually generated there.) In the “Extended Standard Theory”, semantic interpretation occurred at two points—once at Deep Structure, and once at Surface Structure (this was in response to issues with the interpretation of scope, as discussed below). This was followed by the move to an LF-input view. In much current Minimalist thinking, chunks of structure are interpreted piece-by-piece, e.g., at phase edges. Compositionality is the concept of assembling the meaning of a larger constituent from the meaning of its component parts via some principles of combination. A number of pragmatic or discourse-level (context dependent) phenomena present problems even for non-strict interpretations of compositionality; it is difficult, for instance, to see how conversational implicatures or the meaning lent by sarcasm could be computed by the same mechanism that determines the interpretation of verb phrases. At the syntax-semantics interface, there are several levels at which compositionality might be expected to hold: with sentence-level modification like negation; at clause level, from the composition of the external argument with the verb phrase; within the VP, to account for the composition of the verb with its internal argument; and within (the equivalent of) determiner phrases, adjective phrases, adverb phrases, etc. Depending on one’s theory of morphology, the syntax may also be responsible for producing the input to the lexical(- level) semantics—see e.g. Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993, Harley 1999, etc.) for a view of morphology where word-building is done in the syntax. In formal semantics, Frege’s concept of semantic composition as the “saturation” of functions (i.e., as functional application) has remained in the fore, with Heim & Kratzer’s (1998) work being an important contribution. The concept of composition as functional application has been used in both extensional and intensional semantics. It is based on the idea that the meanings of words (and larger constituents) need to be “completed” with something else. (For example, the meaning of a transitive verb is incomplete without its direct object.) Sentence meanings are arrived at by a series of applications of functions to their arguments (which the functions need in order to be “saturated”). At the sentence level, the output is no longer a function but whatever the theory holds to be the meaning of a sentence—in extensional truth-conditional semantics, a truth value. Early formalisms based on Montague Grammar (Montague 1974) worked from the perspective that each phrase level’s syntactic rule had a separate mechanism for semantic interpretation. Klein and Sag (1985) proposed that each constituent needing an interpretation was of a certain basic type; in their theory it was these types that had rules for interpretation rather than the syntactic rules themselves. Klein & Sag used the types of individuals, truth values, and situations to form their higher types; work in event semantics (following Davidson 1967) has also proposed a type for events. Other rules of composition have been introduced, such as predicate modification (e.g., Heim & Kratzer 1998). This allows the meaning of intersective adjective phrases to be computed: it essentially lets us say that the meaning of brown house is the same as the meaning of brown plus the meaning of house. Non-intersective adjectives present some trouble for predicate modification. In addition to the mechanics of compositionality, theories of semantic interpretation differ in terms of how homomorphic they assert the syntax and the semantics to be—that is, how much of the interpretation is allowed outside the confines of the compositional meaning. Sentence meaning in strictly compositional theories (e.g., Montague’s 1970 approach) is derived only from the meaning of the syntactic parts and the way they are combined; in non-strictly compositional theories there are also rules that operate on the semantics itself, without a syntactic rule involved (as in some of Partee’s work, e.g. Partee & Rooth 1983). 2.2 Theta Theory The interaction between theta roles (e.g., external argument) and their associated thematic roles (e.g., agent) sits naturally at the syntax-semantics interface. The aim is to discover the connections between syntactic arguments and the semantic part(s) they play in sentences. The Theta Criterion has been the focus of much work in government and binding theory and its successors. The original formulation (Chomsky 1981) said that each theta role must be realized by one argument and each argument must be assigned one theta role. This was recast in Chomsky (1986) in terms of chains. An argument (e.g., a subject noun phrase in a passive) undergoes movement, and the coindexed positions it occupies before and after this movement make up a chain; the chain itself gets the theta role. The formal representation of theta roles also underwent changes—the early “theta grid” only represented the theta roles themselves with an indication of their status as internal or external, while later conceptions (e.g. as laid out in Haegeman’s 1991 textbook) also include argument structure information. Thematic roles and relations themselves have also received much attention. Work on “thematic hierarchies” (e.g. Larson 1988; Grimshaw 1990) attempts to explain the assignment of thematic role participants to their positions in the syntax. Dowty’s work (beginning with 1991) on proto-roles (Proto-Agent and Proto-Patient) was a reaction to the difficulty researchers were having in finding cross-linguistically reliable role categories. A notably different approach to defining roles is seen in Jackendoff’s work on thematic relations. Jackendoff (e.g., 1983) approaches the task from the semantics (or, rather, “conceptual structure”) side only—thematic relations are defined by conceptual structure primitives in different configurations. A number of researchers have also concerned themselves with the relation between thematic roles, argument structure/selection, and event structure. Krifka (1989) and Verkuyl (e.g. 1989) both propose aspectually specifying features to better account for particular thematic relationships (see Ramchand 1993 for an implementation). More recently, Ramchand (in her 2008 monograph) lays out primitives for decomposing verb meaning. She argues that in order to discover and understand thematic roles, we must first have the correct features that make up events, “since participants in the event will only be definable via the role they play in the event or subevent” (p.