The lexicon-syntax interface: a personal perspective Jaume Mateu (Centre de Lingüística Teòrica/Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) The main goal of my first CGG talk on the lexicon-syntax interface (Mateu 1996) was to provide a lexical-syntactic account of Demonte’s (1991: 64-68) insights on how aktionsart effects constrain the so-called “locative alternation” (aka spray-load alternation). In subsequent work I tried to provide an explanation of Demonte’s (1991: 64) important observation that this alternation is less productive in Romance languages like Spanish when compared to Germanic ones like English: cf. Mateu (2002: 206-226) for a preliminary lsyntactic analysis of Talmy’s (1991, 2000) typology applied to the locative alternation, which has been further developed by Acedo-Matellán (2010: 155-164) and explored in more detail by Lewandowski (2014). In the present talk, I will elaborate on the second point above and will deal with the typological variation involved in the locative alternation in the light of a formal distinction between incorporation and conflation processes (see Haugen [2009], Mateu [2012], and Acedo-Matellán [2013], i.a.). In particular, the verb in both variants of the locative alternation (i.e., the theme-object frame and the location-object one) can be claimed to acquire phonological content in two different ways: via incorporation (i.e., the root comes from an inner Small Clause-predicate position and is copied into the null verb) or via conflation (i.e., the root is directly adjoined to the null verb). Talmy’s (1991, 2000) well-known typological distinction between satellite-framed languages and verb-framed languages can be shown to be relevant when arguing for two types of locative alternation: crucially, verb-framed languages (i.e., those languages where the Path/Result head lacks independent morphophonological status with respect to the verb) lack the locative alternation variants that involve conflation of a root with a null verb. Only the locative alternation variants that can be claimed to involve incorporation are expected to be found in verb-framed languages. Assuming the plausible proposal that conflation can be reduced to External Merge and incorporation to Internal Merge (cf. Chomsky 2001f), the relevant crosslinguistic differences will be shown not to involve parametrizing the syntax of argument structure but rather have to do with the morphophonological licensing of some relational elements. As a result, the Talmian distinction between satellite-framed languages vs. verb-framed ones does not involve parametrizing External Merge (e.g., cf. the descriptive distinction “conflation languages” (e.g., Germanic) vs. “non-conflation languages” (e.g., Romance)) but can rather be accounted for by the different morphophonological encodings of Path/Result (cf. Mateu & Rigau (2002) and Acedo-Matellán (2010), i.a.). The case study selected for the purposes of this talk will be shown to be useful for comparing and discussing different views of the lexicon-syntax interface (cf. Demonte 2006; Levin & Rappaport Hovav 2005; Mendikoetxea 2007; Marantz 2013; Mateu 2014, Zubizarreta & Oh 2007; i.a.). Selected references Demonte, Violeta (1991). Detrás de la palabra. Estudios de gramática del español. Madrid: Alianza Universidad. Demonte, Violeta (2006). “Qué es sintáctico y qué es léxico en la interfaz entre sintaxis y léxico-semántica: hipótesis y conjeturas”. Signo y Seña 15: 17-42. Mateu, Jaume (1996). “Sobre la sintaxis léxica de la alternancia locativa”. Paper presented at the VI Colloquium on Generative Grammar. Universitat de València, March 27-29. Mateu, Jaume (2012). “Conflation and incorporation processes in resultative constructions”. In Violeta Demonte & Louise McNally (eds.). Telicity, Change, and State. A Cross-Categorial View of Event Structure. 252-278. Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press.