English Syntax: An Introduction Jong-Bok Kim and Peter Sells January 11, 2008 CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE AND INFORMATION Contents Preface xi 1 Some Basic Properties of English Syntax 1 1.1 Some Remarks on the Essence of Human Language 1 1.2 How We Discover Rules 4 1.3 Why Do We Study Syntax and What Is It Good for? 7 1.4 Exercises 9 2 From Words to Major Phrase Types 11 2.1 Determining the Lexical Categories 12 2.3 Grammar with Lexical Categories 17 2.5 Phrase Structure Rules 22 2.1 NP: Noun Phrase 22 2.2 VP: Verb Phrase 23 2.3 AP: Adjective Phrase 25 2.4 AdvP: Adverb Phrase 25 2.5 PP: Preposition Phrase 26 2.6 Grammar with Phrases 26 2.7 Exercises 31 3 Syntactic Forms, Grammatical Functions, and Semantic Roles 35 3.2 Grammatical Functions 36 v vi / E NGLISH S YNTAX : A N I NTRODUCTION 3.2 Direct and Indirect Objects 38 3.3 Form and Function Together 41 3.5 Exercises 46 4 Head, Complements, and Modifiers 49 4.1 Projections from Lexical Heads to Phrases 49 4.2 Notion of Head, Complements, and Modifiers 50 4.2 Differences between Complements and Modifiers 52 4.3 PS Rules, X -Rules, and Features 55 4.4 Lexicon and Feature Structures 62 4.1 Feature Structures and Basic Operations 62 4.2 Feature Structures for Linguistic Entities 65 4.4 Verb Types and Argument Structure 67 4.5 Exercises 71 5 More on Subjects and Complements 73 5.1 Grammar Rules and Principles 73 5.2 Feature Specifications on the Complement Values 76 5.1 Complements of Verbs 76 5.2 Complements of Adjectives 80 5.3 Complements of Common Nouns 82 5.3 Feature Specifications for the Subject 83 5.4 Clausal Complement or Subject 84 5.1 Verbs Selecting a Clausal Complement 84 5.2 Verbs Selecting a Clausal Subject 90 5.3 Adjectives Selecting a Clausal Complement 91 5.4 Nouns Selecting a Clausal Complement 93 5.5 Prepositions Selecting a Clausal Complement 94 5.5 Exercises 95 C ONTENTS / vii 6 Noun Phrases and Agreement 97 6.1 Classification of Nouns 97 6.3 Agreement Types and Morpho-syntactic Features 101 6.1 Noun-Determiner Agreement 101 6.2 Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement 103 6.3 Subject-Verb Agreement 103 6.4 Semantic Agreement Features 105 6.5 Partitive NPs and Agreement 109 6.2 Two Types of Partitive NPs 111 6.3 Measure Noun Phrases 116 6.6 Modifying an NP 118 6.1 Adjectives as Prenominal Modifiers 118 6.7 Exercises 121 7 Raising and Control Constructions 125 7.1 Raising and Control Predicates 125 7.2 Differences between Raising and Control Verbs 126 7.1 Subject Raising and Control 126 7.2 Object Raising and Control 129 7.3 A Simple Transformational Approach 130 7.1 Identical Syntactic Structures 132 7.2 Differences in Subcategorization Information 134 7.3 Mismatch between Meaning and Structure 138 7.5 Explaining the Differences 141 7.1 Expletive Subject and Object 141 7. Object Control Verbs 143 7.6 Exercises 145 viii / E NGLISH S YNTAX : A N I NTRODUCTION 8 Auxiliary Constructions 149 8.2 Be and Have 155 8.4 Infinitival Clause Marker to 160 8.4 Explaining the NICE Properties 160 8.1 Auxiliaries with Negation 160 8.2 Auxiliaries with Inversion 164 8.4 Auxiliaries with Ellipsis 169 8.5 Exercises 172 9 Passive Constructions 175 9.2 Relationships between Active and Passive 176 9.3 Approaches to Passive 178 9.1 From Structural Description to Structural Change 178 9.5 Exercises 190 10 Wh-Questions 193 10.1 Clausal Types and Interrogatives 193 10.3 Feature Percolation with No Abstract Elements 197 10.2 Non-subject Wh-questions 199 10.3 Subject Wh-Questions 204 10.2 Non-Wh Indirect Questions 213 10.3 Infinitival Indirect Questions 214 10.4 Adjunct wh-questions 217 10.5 Exercises 220 C ONTENTS / ix 11 Relative Clause Constructions 223 11.2 Non-subject Wh-Relative Clauses 224 11.3 Subject Relative Clauses 229 11.4 That-relative clauses 231 11.5 Infinitival and Bare Relative Clauses 233 11. Nonrestrictive Relative Clauses 236 11.7 Constraints on the GAP 239 11.8 Exercises 243 12 Special Constructions 245 12.2 Distributional Properties of the Three clefts 259 12.3 Syntactic Structures of the Three Types of Cleft: Movement Analyses 260 12.4 Lexically-Based Analyses 262 12.5 Exercises 270 References 273 Index 285 Preface One important aspect of teaching English syntax (to native and nonnative undergraduate stu- dents alike) involves the balance in the overall approach between facts and theory. We under- stand that one important goal of teaching English syntax to undergraduate students 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 phe- nomena. This new introductory textbook has been developed with this goal in mind. 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, theoret- ical concepts of generative 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.
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. In Chapter 6, we introduce English subject verb agreement, and concentrate on interrelationships xi xii / E NGLISH S YNTAX : A N I NTRODUCTION 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. This chapter assigns the precise lexical information to auxiliary verbs and con- structional constraints sensitive to the presence of an auxiliary verb. This allows us to express generalizations among auxiliary-sensitive phenomena such as negation, inversion, contraction, and ellipsis, which we would otherwise be missed.
From Chapter 9 through Chapter 12, the textbook discusses how to capture systematic re- lations between related constructions. Chapter 9 deals with the relationships between active and passive voice clauses. Studying this chapter, students will be able to fully understand why, how, and when to choose between canonical and passive constructions. Chapters 10 and 11 deal with wh-questions and relative clause constructions, often called non-local or long-distance de- pendency constructions, in the sense that a gap and its filler are in a potentially long-distance relationship.
These two chapters present the basic properties of these constructions and show how the mechanism of feature percolation is a crucial part of a systematic account for them. The final chapter of the book covers the so-called ‘tough’ constructions, extraposition, and cleft constructions. These constructions are also based on long-distance dependencies, but different from the constructions in chapters 10 and 11. The goal of all these chapters is the present a groundwork of facts, which students will then have in hand, in order to consider theoretical accounts which apply in precise ways.
We have tried to make each chapter maximally accessible. We provide clear, simple tree diagrams which will help students understand the structures of English and develop analytic skills to English syntax. The theoretical notions are kept as simple yet precise as possible so that students can apply and use them in analyzing English sentences. Each chapter also contains exercises ranging from simple to challenging, aiming to promote deeper understanding of the factual and theoretical contents of each chapter.
Numerous people have helped us in writing this textbook, in various ways. We thank for their comments in various places, help and interest in our textbook: [.] We also thank teachers and colleagues in Kyung Hee University and Stanford University for their constant encouragement over the years. Our gratitude also goes to undergraduate and graduate students at Kyung Hee University who used the draft of this as the textbook and raised so many questions that help us reshape its structure as well as contents. We also thank Jinyoung Kim, Dongjun Lee, and Juwon Lee for their administrative help.
We also owe out thanks to Dikran Karagueuzian, Director of CSLI Publications, for his patience and support, as well as Lauri Kanerva for his help in matters of production. We also thank Kaunghi Un for helping us with P REFACE / xiii LATEX problems. Lastly, but not the least, we also truly thank our close friends and family members who gave us unconditional love and support in every possible regard. We dedicate this book to our beloved ones who with true love and refreshing and comforting words have lead us to think ‘wise and syntactic’ when we are spiritually and physically down.
1 Some Basic Properties of English Syntax 1.1 Some Remarks on the Essence of Human Language One of the crucial functions of any human language, such as English or Korean, is to convey various kinds of information from the everyday to the highly academic. Language provides a means for us to describe how to cook, how to remove cherry stains, how to understand English grammar, or how to provide a convincing argument. We commonly consider certain properties of language to be key essential features from which the basic study of linguistics starts. The first well-known property (as emphasized by Saussure 1916) is that there is no moti- vated relationship between sounds and meanings.
This is simply observed in the fact that the same meaning is usually expressed by a different sounding-word in a different language (think of house, maison, casa). For words such as hotdog, desk, dog, bike, hamburger, cran- berry, sweetbread, their meanings have nothing to do with their shapes. For example, the word hotdog has no relationship with a dog which is or feels hot. There is just an arbitrary relation- ship between the word’s sound and its meaning: this relationship is decided by the convention of the community the speakers belong to.
The second important feature of language, and one more central to syntax, is that language makes infinite use of finite set of rules or principles, the observation of which led the de- velopment of generative linguistics in the 20th century (cf. A language is a system for combining its parts in infinitely many ways. One piece of evidence of the system can be observed in word-order restrictions. If a sentence is an arrangement of words and we have 5 words such as man, ball, a, the, and kicked, how many possible combinations can we have from these five words? More importantly, are all of these combinations grammatical sentences?