arguments

the participants minimally involved in an action defined by the predicate. The complements and the subject, the latter also called an external argument.

bracketed representation

a representation of grammatical structure by bracketing those constituents that belong together, an alternative to tree diagrams.

complementiser

a constituent introducing a sentential complement. The complementisers in English are that, if ,and for. They occupy the head position of CP and have selectional restrictions on the force and finiteness of the clause. Feature composition: [+F, –N, –V]

declarative clause

a positive or negative statement mainly used to convey information.

[±F]

one of the three basic binary features on which all categories can be defined. With the help of these features we can explain why we have the categories that we do and also describe how these categories are related. With the help of the three binary features we can predict what kinds of categories are possible in human language, we can give an exclusive list of them. [±F] is a feature used to distinguish between functional and thematic categories. [–F] categories have thematic content and [+F] categories do not. The categories with [+F] feature are the following: inflections, complementisers, determiners and degree adverbs. Certain categories are unspecified for the [±F] feature, see underspecification.

force

the distinction between declarative and interrogative interpretation.

functional category

categories without lexical content, fulfilling some grammatical function in a given structure: inflections, determiners, degree adverbs and complementisers.

interrogative clause

a structure mainly used to ask for information, either in the form of a yes–no question or a wh-question.

lexical entry

a collection of the idiosyncratic properties of lexical items.

predicate

the part of the clause excluding the subject giving information about the subject: Mary [is clever/likes chocolate/is waiting for Jamie/was in bed/is a university student].

theta-grid

that part of a predicate’s lexical entry which informs us about what theta-roles the predicate has.

theta role

the semantic role of the participants as required by the predicate. E.g. verbs define what kind of semantic relationship is to be established between the verb itself and the arguments of the verb, and arguments are selected accordingly. The verb kick calls for an agent subject, so its subject position cannot be occupied by e.g. my CD-player.

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Basic English Syntax with Exercises

1.3.3 Grammatical aspects of meaning

Consider the following bracketed sentence:

(47)I think [that Mary may marry Martin]

The predicate here is the verb marry and the arguments are Mary and Martin. Let us call the part of meaning expressed by a predicate and its arguments the basic proposition. But what role do the other words, may and that, have in the sentence? Clearly, they have no role in the basic proposition, being neither predicates nor arguments. But they do carry some meaning. May is a modal auxiliary verb and in this sentence it either expresses that the event described by the predicate and its arguments (Mary marrying Martin) is a possibility or that permission has been given for it to take place:

(48)aMary may marry Martin – but it’s not sure that she will.
bMary may marry Martin – his mum will allow it.

The kind of meaning we are talking of here is known as the modality of the sentence and thus auxiliary verbs like may, can, should, etc. express modality.

That is a complementiser and its meaning is a little more difficult to determine. We can see its meaning if we compare (47) to (49):

(49)I asked [if Mary may marry Martin]

In the bracketed sentence here, the complementiser is if and we can see that the difference between this and the previous case is that here the sentence is interpreted as a question, not a statement as previously. The sentence beginning with that is declarative and the one beginning with if is interrogative. Given that the only difference between the two is the complementiser, it seems reasonable to assume that this is what the complementiser contributes to the meaning of the sentence. The distinction between declarative and interrogative is known as the force of the sentence and hence complementisers contribute to this aspect of sentence meaning.

Functional categories, such as modal auxiliaries and complementisers are specified for the [+F] value and a distinguishing property of these categories is that they are not involved with the assignment of Θ-roles. They therefore lack Θ-grids in their lexical entries.

Having established this major division we will now proceed to investigate the individual categories.

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