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).