Practical Grammar 6

Governable grammatical functions

In linguistics, a head governs a property of another expression if it requires this expression to have that property. Governable properties include grammatical functions, cases, and particular prepositions.

In Lexical-Functional Grammar, the governable grammatical functions are those which may be listed in the PRED values of meaningful words The textbook (p. 21) gives a complete list:

Governable grammatical functions: SUBJ, OBJ, OBJ-θ, OBL-θ, POSS, COMP, and XCOMP.

There are other GFs, for instance TOPIC and FOCUS, but heads cannot govern those.

The Greek letter θ (= theta) in the functions OBJ-θ and OBL-θ is an abbreviation. It stands for the name of a thematic role (the thematic roles are listed on p. 13 in the textbook).

Here are some comments on the functions other than SUBJ and OBJ:

• OBJ-THEME: the GF of the second NP object of a ditransitive verb like give (e.g. give Mary a present)
• OBL-LOC: the GF of a locative complement of a verb like sit (e.g. sit at the window)
• OBL-BEN: the GF of a benefactive PP (bake a cake for Mary)
• POSS: the GF of the possessor within an NP (e.g. my book)
• COMP: the GF of a finite complement clause complement of a verb like say (e.g. said that Mary called)
• XCOMP: the GF of non-finite phrases with understood subjects (e.g. Lilly tried to leave)

The Completeness and Coherence Conditions

Words may specify in their lexical entries that they govern one or more GFs. These GFs are mentioned in the word's PRED value, e.g.

(1) disappear: [PRED   'DISAPPEAR<SUBJ>']
(2) see: [PRED   'SEE<SUBJ, OBJ>']

This means that the verb disappear governs one GF, namely a SUBJ and the verb see governs two GFs, a SUBJ and an OBJ. As a result, these verbs must appear with exactly these GFs, neither more, nor less. This is ensured by the following two principles:

The Completeness Condition (p. 21)
All governable functions which are part of the value of a PRED feature must be present in the local f-structure. All functions that have a θ-role must themselves have a PRED value.

This is the "nor less" part from above: the f-structure of a PRED must contain at least the GFs which it selects in its PRED value.

The "neither more" part is stated in the

Coherence Condition (p. 22)
All governable functions present in an f-structure must occur in the value of a local PRED feature. All functions that have a PRED value must have a θ-role.

So, an f-structure is complete and coherent only if there is a 1:1 relation between the GFs listed in its PRED value and the actual GFs present in the f-structure! If this is not the case, then the f-structure is ill-formed.

Governable features

Above, it was said that not only the GFs but also other properties of its dependents can be governed by a selecting head. These include inflectional features like PER, NUM, and CASE. In other words, a head can require that its dependents have particular values for such features. In this section, we will see how this is done.

Subject-verb agreement

In Week 3, we already saw how features can be added to words. There we formulated lexical entries like the following:

this D
     [PER:3,
      NUM:sg];

We can do the same in defining pronouns:

she N
    [PER:3,
     NUM:sg];

i N
   [PER:1,
    NUM:sg];

it N
   [PER:3,
    NUM:sg];

We now need to ensure that only expressions with features like those of she can act as subjects of a verb like disappears. This is easy to accomplish: in order for disappears to impose feature values on its SUBJ, it can simply refer to the f-structure of that SUBJ, as follows:

disappears D
           [PRED   'DISAPPEAR<SUBJ>',
            SUBJ   [...]];

The presence of a SUBJ in the verb's f-structure is guaranteed by Completeness: since the verb selects a SUBJ in its PRED value, there has to be a SUBJ. And that SUBJ has its own f-structure. Any feature-value pairs in the place of the dots inside the embedded brackets above must be present in the f-structure of the SUBJ. This is an example of feature government.

Exercise 6.1 The 3rd person singular present tense

1. Go to https://xlfg.labri.fr/ and log in.
2. Open your version of Grammar 5.
3. To the verb disappears, add constraints that ensure that its SUBJ is 3rd person singular. Note that the verb in this system does NOT need to have the features PER and NUM itself! Rather, the verb form with the shape disappears requires its SUBJ to have particular values for these features and disappear requires its SUBJ to have different feature values, as we will see below.
4. Add the following test sentences:

she disappears

*i disappears

it disappears

5. Parse.

Exercise 6.2 The past tense

The past tense of verbs other than the auxiliary be are easy, since the form of the verb is the same for all six person-number combinations. The most economical treatment for this is to make words like disappeared impose no constraints on the PER and NUM values of their subject.

1. Go to https://xlfg.labri.fr/ and log in.
2. Open your version of Grammar 5.
3. Add the verb disappeared to the lexicon and make sure that it is compatible with subjects of every person and number.
4. Add the following test sentences:

she disappeared

i disappeared

it disappeared

6. Parse.

Exercise 6.3 The non-third person singular present tense

The present tense verb form disappear is less convenient to handle, since it is inbetween allowing only one kind of subject or all subjects. Rather, it allows subjects of 5 out of 6 person-number combinations:

(1) i disappear
(2) you disappear
(3) *he/she/it disappear
(4) we disappear
(5) you disappear
(6) they disappear

This is awkward to state in any formal grammar of English, but that is not the grammarian's fault. Languages aren't always completely regular! We use a disjunction (= an or-statement) to contrain the subjects that non-3rd person singular present tense verbs permit. The symbol for or in XLFG is the stroke: "|". You can either use the keyboard to enter it, but there is also a button for it in the XLFG editor.

The entry for disappear using disjunction then looks as follows:

disappear V
[PRED: 'DISAPPEAR<SUBJ>',
 TENSE: pres,
 SUBJ: [PER:1] | [PER:2] | [NUM:pl] ];

This is not pretty, but does what it is supposed to do. Note that it allows this verb's SUBJ to have 5 out of the 6 possible person-number combinations.

1. Go to https://xlfg.labri.fr/ and log in.
2. Open your version of Grammar 5.
3. Add the verb disappear to the lexicon as given above
4. Add (1)-(6) as test sentences:
5. Parse.

Case

The treatment of English case is pretty straightforward. For now, we will only deal with arguments of the verb so that we have to account for nominative and accusative pronouns. We thus postulate a feature CASE with the two possible values nom and acc. Some pronouns are only compatible with one of these values, but other pronouns and all non-pronominal nouns are compatible with both cases.

The only minor complication arises again with non-3rd singular person verbs in the present tense. This is not a grammatical complication, but an issue of how to combine agreement with case information in the SUBJ specification of these verbs. Proceed as follows: to each of the three disjuncts in the SUBJ specification, add the correct CASE information. (So, you need to make 3 additions to the last line of the lexical entry of disappear immediately above.)

Exercise 6.4 Nominative and accusative

1. Where necessary, add the appropriate case information to all the nouns and verbs in your current grammmar. 2. Add the following test items::

*her disappears

lilly disappears

*me disappear

3. Parse!

Exercise 6.5 Nominative and accusative

1. . Add the following test items:

lilly likes her

*lilly likes she

lilly likes it

lilly likes john

3. Parse!

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