Semi-lexical Categories : The Function of Content Words and the Content of Function Words

The distinction between functional categories and lexical categories is at the heart of present-day grammatical theory, in theories on language acquisition, code-switching and aphasia. At the same time, it has become clear, however, that there are many lexical items for which it is less easy to decide whether they side with the lexical categories or the functional ones. This book deals with the grammatical behavior of such in- between-categories, which are referred to here as "semi-lexical categories".

"In conclusion, I believe Semi-lexical categories to significantly advance our understanding of how the feature content of lexical items triggers or interacts with their syntactic behaviour. Moreover, the authors contributing to the volume carry this task out in an essentially minimalist fashion, as they clearly and precisely identify semi-lexical categories and their properties, and then proceed to attempt to reduce their nature and behaviour to that of better-studied entities and phenomena."
Phoevos Panagiotidis in: Linguistics 41/2005