Grammar Writing: Week 11

Auxiliaries, Identity and the Head-Complement Rule

So far, all our sentences just had a single finite main verb in them. But, of course English also has sentences with one or more auxiliary verbs and a main verb:

1. Lilly is dancing
2. Lilly has danced
3. Lilly will dance
4. Lilly will be dancing
5. Lilly will have danced
6. Lilly will have been dancing

Exercise

While the sentences above are grammatical, the ones below are ungrammatical:

7. *Lilly is dance
8. *Lilly has dancing
9. *Lilly will danced

Fill in the blanks below:

a. The forms of the progressive auxiliary be select a VP-complement whose VFORM value is: _____ .
b. The forms of the progressive auxiliary have select a VP-complement whose VFORM value is: _____ .
c. The forms of the progressive auxiliary will select a VP-complement whose VFORM value is: _____ .

Exercise

Add lexical entries to your grammar which license all the sentences (1)-(6), but disallow (7)-(9).

Make the following assumptions:

1. All auxiliaries belong to part of speech verb.
2. Some auxiliaries have different inflectional forms (e.g. be, is, been).
3. The modal auxiliaries (e.g. must, can) and will only have finite forms.
4. If an auxiliary has more than one form, then you need a lexical entry for each different form!
5. Every auxiliary selects a VP-complement with a particular VFORM value (see above).

NOTE: in order to complete this excercise, you do NOT need to add any syntactic rules. All you need are the lexical entries of the auxiliaries!

CAUTION: make sure that your grammar does NOT license any of the following sentences:

8.* Lilly is liking.
9. *Lilly has liked.
10. *Lilly will like.

Hint: the auxiliaries should make sure that their complement is itself COMPS-complete.

Specifiers

Most of the NPs we have modelled so far were either names or pronouns. But like VPs, APs, PPs, and Ss, NPs can of course also consist of more than one word:

11. the cat
12. a cat

These NPs all consist of a determiner D and a noun. Our grammar up to this point does not allow us to license such multi-word NPs. But, it is easy to do so. For that purpose, we will postulate a new grammatical function, namely the SPECIFIER. We will assume that the words cat and cats in (11)-(12) are unspecific as to how many (of the) cats the speaker wishes to identify (one vs. more than one) and whether a definite cat is referred about or not (the vs a). The function of the determiner is to specify this kind of information. For this reason, we assume that the NPs in (11)-(12) have the form of SPECIFIER + HEAD.

Exercise

1. Add the part of speech det to the same place in the type hierarchy where the other parts of speech are already defined.
2. Add the feature SPR with value list to the same place in the type hierarchy where the feature COMPS is already defined.
3. Add lexical entries for the determiners the, a, and those to the lexicon. Determines do not need any complements and any specifiers.
4. Delete the old lexical entry for the word cat.
5. Add a new lexical entry for cat as follows: there word takes no complements but does take one D as specifier.

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