There are at least two types of verb-plus-preposition (V-P) combination which Huddleston & Pullum (2002) call fossilised and nonfossilised, such as come across ‘encounter’ in come across a picture and refer to ‘consult’ in refer to a book, respectively. This distinction is motivated by the fact that, where the nonfossilised combination may undergo syntactic processes like dislocation, the fossilised counterpart resists them all. This paper attributes such resistance to lexical integrity and proposes a lexical mapping approach to that grammatical contrast. In this approach, both fossilised and nonfossilised V-P combinations count as a lexical construction whose entire category is unspecified in the lexicon, although those of its parts are specified, as in {V P}. Along with this categorial underspecification, two types of mapping are suggested between syntactic and morphological structures (SS and MS, respectively) for the lexical verb phrase (VP) constructed from each lexical construction. One is a simple mapping through which each element in MS separately links to one in SS, and the other a complex mapping that adds a cross-linking to that simple mapping. While the simple mapping works on the nonfossilised type, as in {refer2 to3}1 ↔ [refer2 [to3 his_book4]3]1, the complex mapping operates on the fossilised type, as in {come2 across3}1 ↔ [come2,3 [across3 a_picture4]3]1. In particular, the doubly coindexed subscript numbers 2 and 3 on the verb (come2,3) in the latter indicate the same effect of lexical integrity as lexical verbs have on syntactic processes. Extensions of the proposed analysis are made for explanations of other related constructions.
1. Introduction
2. Basic Properties
3. Previous Studies
4. Proposal
5. Concluding Remarks