Grammar Writing: Week 9

More Complement Types

So far, we have only encountered three kinds of verbs, intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive verbs:

1. dances: COMPS <>
2. likes: COMPS <NP>
3. gives: COMPS <NP,NP>

But, there are many more kinds of verbs in English. Restricting ourselves to verbs with one complement, we find the following:

1. likes: COMPS <NP>
2. is: COMPS <AP>
3. depends: COMPS <PP>
4. believes: COMPS <sentence>

Task 1:

Make sure that your type hierarchy contains the parts of speech: noun, verb, adj, and prep. If it lacks one or more of these parts of speech, then add them.

Task 2:

Add the following words to the lexicon, giving each an empty COMPS list: she, her, happy.

Task 3:

Add the preposition on to the lexicon with  COMPS <NP>.

Task 4:

If necessary, add lexical entries for the verbs likes, is, depends, and believes. Make sure that each verb has the COMPS list given above!

Question

We want to write rules that license all the VPs below. How many rules do we need for each VP and how many VP rules do we need altogether?

1. likes her. Number of VP rules: __
2. is happy. Number of VP rules: __
3. depends on her. Number of VP rules: __
4. believes she is happy. Number of VP rules: __

Total number of VP rules needed: __