Grammar Writing: Week 4
Adding More Features
The feature VFORM
Many verbs have more than one form. For instance, we find not only see, but also sees, saw, seen, and seeing. In one most syntactic environments, only one form of the verb can occur, as is shown below:
(1) Lilly dances.
(2) *Lilly dance.
(3) *Lill dancing.
(4) *Lilly danced. (As perfect participle).
(5) *Lilly is dances.
(6) *Lilly is dance.
(7) Lill is dancing.
(8) *Lilly is danced. (As perfect participle).
(9) *Lilly will dances.
(10) Lilly will dance.
(11) *Lill will dancing.
(12) *Lilly will danced. (As perfect participle).
(13) *Lilly has dances.
(14) Lilly has dance.
(15) *Lill has dancing.
(16) Lilly has danced. (As perfect participle).
For each of these environments above, we therefore must be able to state which verb form is appropriate for it. Therefore, we must be able to describe the verb forms. In order to do so, we proceed in a way similar to the way we handled the case distinctions in nouns.
We declare the feature VFORM as appropriate for the part of speech verb. The value of VFORM is of type vform which takes the subtypes listed in the first column of the table below:
| Verb form | Full name | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| fin | finite | sees, is, will, dances, dance (non-third person singular), danced (past tense) |
| base | base form (= bare infinitive) | see, be, dance, give |
| prp | present participle | seeing, being, dancing, giving |
| pfp | perfect participle | seen, been, danced, given |
Exercise
a. Add the feature VFORM to the part of speech verb. The value of VFORM is of type vform.
b. Add the types fin, base, prp, pfp as subtypes of vform.
c. Add the words sees, see, seeing, and seen to the lexicon with their appropriate part of speech and VFORM value.
Homework Assignment (Due November 5th)
Task 1
In DesktopTrale, model a type hierarchy which includes information on case for nouns and vform for verbs.
Add the following lexical entries: her, "she, "Lilly", "playing", "played", "play", "plays".
Note that no spaces, no upper case letters, only underscore/lower-case characters are allowed !
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