Although it is clearly impossible to attempt to rule out all
semantically anomalous combinations of lexical items at the lexical
level (not to mention undesirable due the fact that arbitrary bits of
world knowledge can affect the felicity of a sentence -- see
copestake:92), the definition of function-argument structures
in terms of ontological categories does rule out certain combinations.
For example, the sentence in ji22 would be ruled out due to the
fact that the go function underlying the semantics of walk
requires its first argument to be a thing, not a
property.
*Happiness walked down the street.
Similarly, some selectional restrictions are captured by explicitly
specifying function values within a verb's lexical structure. For
example, the verb pass may only appear with a PP complement
specifying a route (e.g. John passed by the office). Goals,
directions, etc. are incompatible with the meaning of the verb.
Therefore, the lexical semantics of pass is specified as in
ji23. The semantics of its PP complement must be compatible with
the Path type specified therein.
Jackendoff also attempts to capture more fine-grained selectional restrictions, such as the fact that the argument of drink must be a liquid. He accomplishes this by specifying the value of the semantic argument at the appropriate argument position within the lexical semantics of the verb, as liquid. He further assumes an operation of fusion which merges the value of the verb semantic argument with the semantic value of the argument only if the two are compatible.
A similar approach is used to capture some lexically-specific
inferences, such as the inference associated with the sentence
ji9a that it is butter (and not anything else) which goes onto
the bread. In this case, the first argument of the go function
is specified to be butter in the lexical semantics of the verb
butter (e.g. 
).