English Syntax: An Introduction

1 English syntax : An Introduction Jong-Bok Kim and Peter Sells March 2, 2007. CENTER FOR THE STUDY. OF LANGUAGE. AND INFORMATION. Contents 1 Some Basic Properties of English syntax 1. Some Remarks on the Essence of Human Language 1. How We Discover Rules 4. Why Do We Study syntax and What Is It Good for? 7. Exercises 9. 2 From Words to Major Phrase Types 11. Introduction 11. Lexical Categories 11. Determining the Lexical Categories 11. Content vs. function words 16. Grammar with Lexical Categories 17. Phrasal Categories 19. Phrase Structure Rules 22. NP: Noun Phrase 22. VP: Verb Phrase 23. AP: Adjective Phrase 25. AdvP: Adverb Phrase 25. PP: Preposition Phrase 26. Grammar with Phrases 27. Exercises 32. 3 Syntactic Forms, Grammatical Functions, and Semantic Roles 35. Introduction 35. Grammatical Functions 36.

2 Subjects 36. 3. Direct and Indirect Objects 38. Predicative Complements 39. Oblique Complements 40. Modifiers 41. Form and Function Together 41. Semantic Roles 44. Exercises 47. 4 Head, Complements, and Modifiers 49. Projections from Lexical Heads to Phrases 49. Internal vs. External syntax 49. Notion of Head, Complements, and Modifiers 50. Differences between Complements and Modifiers 52. 0. PS Rules, X -Rules, and Features 55. Lexicon and Feature Structures 61. Feature Structures and Basic Operations 62. Feature Structures for Linguistic Entities 64. Argument Realization 66. Verb Types and Argument Structure 67. Exercises 71. 5 More on Subjects and Complements 73. Grammar Rules and Principles 73. Feature Specifications on the Complement Values 76. Complements of Verbs 76. Complements of Adjectives 80.

3 Complements of Common Nouns 82. Feature Specifications for the Subject 83. Clausal Complement or Subject 85. Verbs Selecting a Clausal Complement 85. Verbs Selecting a Clausal Subject 90. Adjectives Selecting a Clausal Complement 91. Nouns Selecting a Clausal Complement 92. Prepositions Selecting a Clausal Complement 94. Exercises 95. 4. 6 Noun Phrases and Agreement 97. Classification of Nouns 97. Syntactic Structures 98. Projection of Countable Nouns 98. Projection of Pronouns 101. Projection of Proper Nouns 102. Agreement Types and Morpho-syntactic Features 102. Noun-Determiner Agreement 102. Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement 104. Subject-Verb Agreement 104. Semantic Agreement Features 106. Morpho-syntactic and Index Agreement 106. More on Semantic Aspects of Agreement 108. Partitive NPs and Agreement 112.

4 Basic Properties 112. Two Types of Partitive NPs 113. Measure Noun Phrases 119. Modifying an NP 121. Prenominal Modifiers 121. Postnominal Modifiers 122. Exercises 124. 7 Raising and Control Constructions 127. Raising and Control Predicates 127. Differences between Raising and Control Verbs 128. Subject Raising and Control 128. Object Raising and Control 131. A Simple Transformational Approach 132. A Nontransformational Approach 134. Identical Syntactic Structures 134. Differences in Subcategorization Information 136. Mismatch between Meaning and Structure 139. Explaining the Differences 142. Expletive Subject and Object 142. Meaning Preservation 142. Subject vs. Object Control Verbs 143. Exercises 145. 5. 8 Auxiliary Constructions 147. Basic Issues 147. Transformational Analyses 149.

5 A Lexicalist Analysis 150. Modals 150. Be and Have 152. Periphrastic do 155. Infinitival Clause Marker to 157. Explaining the NICE Properties 157. Auxiliaries with Negation 157. Auxiliaries with Inversion 161. Auxiliaries with Contraction 163. Auxiliaries with Ellipsis 164. Exercises 167. 9 Passive Constructions 169. Introduction 169. Relationships between Active and Passive 170. Three Approaches 172. From Structural Description to Structural Change 172. A Transformational Approach 173. A Lexicalist Approach 174. Prepositional Passive 178. Constraints on the Affectedness 181. Other Types of Passive 182. Adjectival Passive 182. Get Passive 183. Middle Voice 184. Exercises 187. 10 Wh-Questions 189. Clausal Types and Interrogatives 189. Movement vs. Feature Percolation 191. Feature Percolation with No Abstract Elements 193.

6 Basic Systems 193. Non-subject Wh-questions 195. Subject Wh-Questions 199. 6. Capturing Subject and Object Asymmetries 201. Indirect Questions 204. Basic Structure 204. Non-Wh Indirect Questions 208. Infinitival Indirect Questions 209. Exercises 212. 11 Relative Clause Constructions 215. Introduction 215. Restrictive vs. Nonrestrictive Relative Clauses 216. Basic Differences 216. Capturing the Differences 218. Types of Postnominal Modifers 221. Subject Relative Clauses 223. That-relative clauses 224. Infinitival and Bare Relative Clauses 226. Island Constraints 230. Exercises 236. 12 Special Constructions 239. Introduction 239. Tough Constructions 240. Tough Predicates 240. A Lexicalist Analysis 241. Extraposition 244. Basic Properties 244. Transformational Analysis 245. A Lexicalist Analysis 246.

7 Cleft constructions 250. Basic Properties 250. Distributional Properties of the Three It-clefts 250. Syntactic Structures of the Three Clefts 252. Exercises 262. Index 277. 7. Preface One important aspect of teaching English syntax (to native speaker students and nonnative speakers alike) involves the balance in the overall approach between facts and theory. We un- derstand that one important goal of teaching English syntax is to help students enhance their understanding of the structure of English in a systematic and scientific way. Basic knowledge of this kind is essential for students to move on the next stages, in which they will be able to perform linguistic analyses for simple as well as complex English phenomena. This new intro- ductory textbook has been developed with this goal in mind.

8 The book focuses primarily on the descriptive facts of English syntax , presented in a way that encourages students to develop keen insights into the English data. It then proceeds with the basic, theoretical concepts of genera- tive grammar from which students can develop abilities to think, reason, and analyze English sentences from linguistic points of view. We owe a great deal of intellectual debt to the previous textbooks and literature on English syntax . In particular, much of the content, as well as our exercises, has been inspired by and adopted from renowned textbooks such as Aarts (1997), Baker (1997), Borsley (1991, 1996), Radford (1988, 1997, 2004), Sag et al. (2003), to list just a few. We acknowledge our debt to these works, which have set the course for teaching syntax over the years.

9 Within this book, Chapters 1 to 5 cover the fundamental notions of English grammar. We start with the basic properties of English words, and then rules for combining these words to form well-formed phrases and, ultimately, clauses. These chapters guide students through the basic concepts of syntactic analysis such as lexical categories, phrasal types, heads, comple- ments, and modifiers. In Chapter 4, as a way of formalizing the observed generalizations, the textbook introduces the feature structure system of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG, Pollard and Sag (1994), Sag et al. (2003)) which places strong emphasis on the role of lexical properties and the interactions among grammatical components. From Chapter 6 on, the book discusses major constructions of English within a holistic view of grammar allowing interactions of various grammatical properties including syntactic forms, their grammatical functions, their semantic roles, and overall aspects of clausal meaning.

10 In Chapter 6, we introduce English subject verb agreement, and concentrate on interrelationships i among different grammatical components which play crucial interacting roles in English agree- ment phenomena. In particular, this chapter shows that once we allow morphological informa- tion to interface with the system of syntax , semantics, or even pragmatics, we can provide good solutions for some puzzling English agreement phenomena, within a principled theory. Chapter 7 covers raising and control phenomena, and provides insights into the properties of the two different constructions, which are famously rather similar in terms of syntactic structures, but different in terms of semantics. Chapter 8 deals with the English auxiliary system, itself remark- able in that a relatively small number of elements interact with each other in complicated and intriguing ways.