Lexical conceptual structure

The term "Lexical Conceptual Structure" was introduced in the 1980s to refer to a structured lexical representation of verb meaning designed to capture those meaning components which determine grammatical behavior, particularly with respect to argument realization. Although the term is no longer much used, representations of verb meaning which share many of the properties of LCSs are still proposed in theories which maintain many of the aims and assumptions associated with the original work on LCSs. As LCSs and the representations that are their descendants take the form of predicate decompositions, the article reviews criteria for positing the primitive predicates that make up LCSs. Following an overview of the original work on LCS, the article traces the developments in the representation of verb meaning that characterize the descendants of the early LCSs. The more recent work exploits the distinction between root and event structure implicit in even the earliest LCS in the determination of grammatical behavior. This work also capitalizes on the assumption that predicate decompositions incorporate a subeventual analysis which defines hierarchical relations among arguments, allowing argument realization rules to be formulated in terms of the geometry of the decomposition.