Grammar Writing: Week 9

More Complement Types

So far, we have only encountered three kinds of verbs, intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive verbs:

1. dances: COMPS <>
2. likes: COMPS <NP>
3. gives: COMPS <NP,NP>

But, there are many more kinds of verbs in English. Restricting ourselves to verbs with one complement, we find the following:

1. likes: COMPS <NP>
2. is: COMPS <AP>
3. depends: COMPS <PP>
4. believes: COMPS <sentence>

Task 1:

Make sure that your type hierarchy contains the parts of speech: noun, verb, adj, and prep. If it lacks one or more of these parts of speech, then add them.

Task 2:

Add the following words to the lexicon, giving each an empty COMPS list: she, her, happy.

Task 3:

Add the preposition on to the lexicon with  COMPS <NP>.

Task 4:

If necessary, add lexical entries for the verbs likes, is, depends, and believes. Make sure that each verb has the COMPS list given above!

Question

We want to write rules that license all the VPs below. How many rules do we need for each VP and how many VP rules do we need altogether?

1. likes her. Number of VP rules: __
2. is happy. Number of VP rules: __
3. depends on her. Number of VP rules: __
4. believes she is happy. Number of VP rules: __

Total number of VP rules needed: __

The greatest thing since the invention of sliced bread: the concept is the same as

Clearly, it is very tedious to write a different VP rule for every verb type that differs from the other verb types from the kind of complement that verb needs to combine with. But actually, things are much worse than this:

1. Not only do verbs with one complement differ from each other in what kind of complement they want to combine with, but the verbs that take two complements do, too. When you count all the verb types, you end up with several dozens, which means that you will also need several dozens different VP rules!
2. In addition, nouns, prepositions, and adjectives also can take complements and may differ from each other in the complements they demand. For these, you will need many different rules for NPs, PPs, and APs in addition to the VP rules.
3. Altogether, you end up with a grammar of more than a hundred rules for phrases.
4. THERE HAS TO BE A BETTER WAY TO HANDLE THIS PROBLEM!