Grammar Writing: Week 11

Auxiliaries, Identity and the Head-Complement Rule

So far, all our sentences just had a single finite main verb in them. But, of course English also has sentences with one or more auxiliary verbs and a main verb:

1. Lilly is dancing
2. Lilly has danced
3. Lilly will dance
4. Lilly will be dancing
5. Lilly will have danced
6. Lilly will have been dancing

Exercise

While the sentences above are grammatical, the ones below are ungrammatical:

7. *Lilly is dance
8. *Lilly has dancing
9. *Lilly will danced

Fill in the blanks below:

a. The forms of the progressive auxiliary be select a VP-complement whose VFORM value is: _____ .
b. The forms of the progressive auxiliary have select a VP-complement whose VFORM value is: _____ .
c. The forms of the progressive auxiliary will select a VP-complement whose VFORM value is: _____ .

Exercise

Add lexical entries to your grammar which license all the sentences (1)-(6), but disallow (7)-(9).

Make the following assumptions:

1. All auxiliaries belong to part of speech verb.
2. Some auxiliaries have different inflectional forms (e.g. be, is, been).
3. The modal auxiliaries (e.g. must, can) and will only have finite forms.
4. If an auxiliary has more than one form, then you need a lexical entry for each different form!
5. Every auxiliary selects a VP-complement with a particular VFORM value (see above).

NOTE: in order to complete this excercise, you do NOT need to add any syntactic rules. All you need are the lexical entries of the auxiliaries!

CAUTION: make sure that your grammar does NOT license any of the following sentences:

8.* Lilly is liking
9. *Lilly has liked
10. *Lilly will like

Hint: the auxiliaries should make sure that their complement is itself COMPS-complete, i.e. either is an intransitive verb or a VP whose head verb has combined with all its complements.

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