Practical Grammar 3

Features

The lexical entries in Grammar 1 all looked like the following:

this D;
those D;
bottle N;
bottles N;

Together with the rule

NP -> D N;

the grammar accepts all the following strings as grammatical:

(1) this bottle
(2) *those bottle
(3) those bottles
(4) *those bottle

In this unit, we will change the grammar so that it makes the correct predictions about (1)-(4).

The source of the problem pointed out above is easy to spot: English determiners and nouns can both be singular or plural and in an NP of the form 'D N' the two words have to agree in number: either they are both singular or both plural. This is shown by (1)-(4).

What this shows, is that so far, the grammar does not contain enough information about words. Besides a part of speech, words also have inflectional features and the values of these features are regulated in the syntax (this is why these features are also called morphosyntactic features: they determine the morphological shape of words, but there distribution is determined by the syntax).

Features

So, let us add features to words. First, some terminology. We make a distinction between a feature and its value(s). This is illustrated for nouns and determiners below:

1. Nouns and determiners carry the features PER(son) and NUM(ber).
2. The possible values of the feature PER are: 1, 2, 3.
3. The possible values of the feature NUM are: sg, pl.

With these concepts, we can add features to the words in (1)-(4) which will lead to the correct predictions for these sentences by our grammar.

Exercise

Change the lexical entry of the word this exactly as is shown below:

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

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