What Should the Lexicon Be Like?-A Biolinguistic Perspective

The present paper argues that mainstream theories in contemporary linguistics, including the dominant Minimalist Program, are flawed in their conceptions of the lexicon, especially in view of the perceived fact that language is a recent and emergent system.We provide an alternative anti-lexicalist view, as in Distributed Morphology (DM), on the content and form of the lexicon, such that it should not be generative, but rather should consist of a static list of morphemes accessible to syntactic computation; morphology in the traditional sense should be post-syntactic instead of pre-syntactic.Many stipulated features and categories should be purged from the lexicon, such as categorial features, argument structure, and the inventory of the inflected forms of the lexical verb.