Syntax 1 Wiki: Week 2
In Week 1 and the exercises on Parts of Speech and Predicates and their Arguments, we dealt with two concepts: words and phrases belong to different parts of speech and they take semantic and syntactic arguments.
This week, we will deal with both topics in greater detail and will also introduce a format for representing linguistic information.
Parts of Speech again
Our online grammar uses the following 7 parts of speech:
| Type | Full name | Tree symbol | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| n | noun | N | Lilly, she, her, I, me, him, we, us, it, cat, letter |
| v | verb | V | visit, like, must, to, see, saw, seen, seeing, seen |
| a | adjective | A | big, new, red |
| p | preposition | P | to, of, with |
| d | determiner | D | the, a, any |
| adv | adverb | Adv | early, very, not |
| c | complementizer | C | that, whether, if |
Features
The table above lists the following words as nouns: Lilly, she, her, I, me, him, it, cat, letter. Even though these words have much in common which distinguishes them from non-nouns (e.g. they can all refer to things in the world), there are also clearly some differences between them. Let us, for instance, check for some of these words whether they can serve as the subject of a main clause:
Subjects:
(1) Lilly appeared.
(2) She appeared.
(3) *Her appeared.
(4) I appeared.
(5) *Me appeared.
(6) *Him appeared.
(7) It appeared.
We see that the following words can act as subjects: Lilly, she, I, it.
Let us now test what happens when we try to use these words as direct objects and objects of prepositions:
Direct objects:
(8) Fido likes Lilly.
(9) *Fido likes she.
(10) Fido likes her.
(11) *Fido likes I.
(12) Fido likes me.
(13) Fido likes him.
(14) Fido likes it.
Objects of prepositions:
(8) Fido talks about Lilly.
(9) *Fido talks about she.
(10) Fido talks about her.
(11) *Fido talks about I.
(12) Fido talks about me.
(13) Fido talks about him.
(14) Fido talks about it.
Homework for Week 3
1. Work through the following sections of the Wiki:
Navigation: