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:
(15) Fido talks about Lilly.
(16) *Fido talks about she.
(17) Fido talks about her.
(18) *Fido talks about I.
(19) Fido talks about me.
(20) Fido talks about him.
(21) Fido talks about it.
This data shows that the following words can act as objects: Lilly, her, me, him, it.
So we see that not all nouns behave alike. Some can occur only in subject position (I, he, she), some only in object position (her, him, me), and a third group can serve both as subject and as object (Lilly, it). When we look at contrasting pairs such as I-me, he-him, she-her, it is clear that the form of the word decides its use in sentences: the first form in each pair can act only as a subject and the second one only as an object. Following traditional grammar, we will account for this as follows:
1. English nouns belong to one of two grammatical cases: nominative and accusative. 2. Only nominative nouns can act as subjects and only accusative nouns can act as objects.
This accounts for the words that can only serve in one function. But what about the words like Lilly and it which can equally well act be subjects as objects? The answer is simple. We will say that these words can be both nominative and accusative!
Another noteworthy aspect of the observations above is that they only apply to words of part of speech noun. For verbs, adjectives, etc. it simply makes no sense to ask what grammatical case they carry.
This discussion leads us to introduce the concept of a FEATURE and its possible values. We will say that it is not a complete description to say that a word belongs to the part of speech n. Rather, the part of speech n has the feature CASE whose possible values in English are nom(inative) and acc(usative).
Homework for Week 3
1. Work through the following sections of the Wiki:
Navigation: