Nanosyntax

Nanosyntax is a novel approach to the architecture of language integrating the results of 30 years of research in principles and parameters as well as the growing structuralization in semantics.

The foundational building block of nanosyntax is based upon the premise that the terminal nodes of the syntactic structures have become very small as the syntactic trees grew. Some recent work in theoretical linguistics suggests that the "atoms" of syntax are much smaller than previously thought. From that it immediately follows that the responsibility of syntax is not limited to ordering "preconstructed" elements. Instead, within the framework of nanosyntax, lexical items are derived entities built in syntax, rather than primitive elements supplied by a lexicon—i.e. syntax does not "project from the lexicon".

This discovery leads to profound and wide-ranging consequences once it is taken seriously.

The beginnings of nanosyntax can be traced to a 1993 article by Kenneth Hale and S. Jay Keyser titled "On Argument Structure and the Lexical Representation of Syntactic Relations", which first introduced the concept of l-syntax.

...
Wikipedia