Semi‐Lexicality: The State of the Art

Abstract

This paper is a state of the art paper on the linguistic phenomenon ‘semi‐lexicality’. We discuss what a semi‐lexical item is, namely an item which is typically considered to be from a lexical, open class (noun, verb, adjective) but which shows morphosyntactic and/or semantic properties that are usually associated with elements from functional, closed classes (quantifiers, auxiliaries, etc.), and its theoretical relevance for the field of generative linguistics. In the first part of the paper, we relate the notion of semi‐lexicality within generative linguistics to the notions of fuzziness and gradience in the fields of cognitive and functional linguistics. In the second part, we discuss earlier and later approaches to semi‐lexicality within the generative framework. In the third part, we discuss the connection between grammaticalisation and semi‐lexicality, with a particular focus on recent generative approaches which explicitly tie these two notions together in one formal analysis.