The semantics of syntactic structures

Over the past 15 years, both linguists and psycholinguists have shown a gro wing interest in the idea that syntactic structures can carry meanings that are independent of the meanings of specific words. This article considers how this idea relates to traditional notions of compositionality in generat ive grammar, and examines two modern theories that, although based on diffe rent starting assumptions, both readily allow syntactic structures to bear independent meaning. We review work from psycholinguistics suggesting that observation alone is often insufficient to support the efficient learning o f word meanings, and that some of the 'slack' left by observation can be pi cked up by the semantics of the syntactic structures in which words appear. We argue that this convergence between linguistic theory and psycholinguis tic experimentation should be no surprise, because language must be learnab le.