Grammar Writing: Week 4

Adding More Features

The feature VFORM

Many verbs have more than one form. For instance, we find not only see, but also sees, saw, seen, and seeing. In one most syntactic environments, only one form of the verb can occur, as is shown below:

(1) Lilly dances.
(2) *Lilly dance.
(3) *Lill dancing.
(4) *Lilly danced. (As perfect participle).

(5) *Lilly is dances.
(6) *Lilly is dance.
(7) Lill is dancing.
(8) *Lilly is danced. (As perfect participle).

(9) *Lilly will dances.
(10) Lilly will dance.
(11) *Lill will dancing.
(12) *Lilly will danced. (As perfect participle).

(13) *Lilly has dances.
(14) Lilly has dance.
(15) *Lill has dancing.
(16) Lilly has danced. (As perfect participle).

For each of these environments above, we therefore must be able to state which verb form is appropriate for it. Therefore, we must be able to describe the verb forms. In order to do so, we proceed in a way similar to the way we handled the case distinctions in nouns.

We declare the feature VFORM as appropriate for the part of speech verb. The value of VFORM is of type vform which takes the subtypes listed in the first column of the table below:

Verb form	Full name	Examples
fin	finite	sees, is, will, dances, dance (non-third person singular), danced (past tense)
base	base form (= bare infinitive)	see, be, dance, give
prp	present participle	seeing, being, dancing, giving
pfp	perfect participle	seen, been, danced, given