agent

one of the thematic or theta-roles, where the argument deliberately performs an action, as Jamie in Jamie sang a song or Robert in Robert kicked the cat. In terms of the UTAH the agentive theta-role is assigned to the specifier position of vP, similarly to experiencer arguments.

arguments

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

determiner

the head of a Determiner Phrase, a closed class item taking an NP complement defining its definiteness. Feature composition: [+F, –N, +V]

distribution

the set of positions that the grammar determines to be possible for a given category. Words that distribute in the same way will belong to the same categories, words that distribute differently will belong to different categories.

intransitive verb

a verb without a nominal complement (the object), e.g. ski. Its subject is either an agent or an experiencer, i.e. one of the theta-roles assigned to the specifier of a vP. Occasionally intransitive verbs appear with a cognate object.

patient

one of the thematic or theta-roles where the argument is affected by the action described by the verb, e.g. in Peter stroked the cat the cat is directly affected by this activity.

phrase

a group of words that can undergo syntactic operations (e.g. movement) as a unit.

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].

preposition

a syntactic unit preceding its complement, the most often a DP defining a special syntactic and/or semantic relationship between the complement and another constituent: cat in the bag/grapes of wrath/tea without sugar/a reduction of taxes. Feature composition: [–F, –N, –V].

proper noun

a name, e.g. John, Wendy Smith, the Beatles. Within the DP it appears as an NP (as opposed to pronouns)

transitive verb

a verb with a nominal complement, e.g. read, buy. The agentive subject occupies the specifier position of vP, the theme object occupies the specifier position of VP.

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Basic English Syntax with Exercises

2.1.2 Phrases

We have said that a sentence can consist of a predicate and its arguments. So in a sentence such as (7):

(7)Prudence pestered Dennis

we have the verb pestered as the predicate which relates the two arguments Prudence, the agent and Dennis, the patient. Now consider a slightly more complex case:

(8)the postwoman pestered the doctor

This could mean exactly the same thing as (7), on the assumption that Prudence is a postwoman and Dennis is a doctor. In this case the arguments seem to be the postwoman and the doctor, a sequence of words made up of a determiner followed by a noun. But what status do these sequences of words have in the sentence? It seems as though they function as single words do in (7), inasmuch as they constitute the same arguments as Prudence and Dennis do. Thus these two words seem to go together to make up a unit which is the functional equivalent of the proper nouns in the original sentence. This unit is called a phrase. We can represent this as follows:

(9)

Thus, a sentence has more internal structure to it than we have so far been assuming. Not only can sentences contain words and other sentences, they can also contain phrases.

To make the drawing of the structures clearer in what follows we will use the symbol S to stand for sentences and the symbol P to stand for phrases. Though it should be made clear that these symbols have no place in the system we will eventually develop and are used now as mnemonics which stand for something we have yet to properly introduce.

Two questions arise immediately: do sentences contain any more phrases than those indicated in (9), and what can phrases contain? To be able to answer these questions, we must first look a little more closely at the properties of phrases in general. The first thing to note is that just as words have distributions in a sentence, so do phrases. This is obvious from the above example, as the phrases the postwoman and the doctor distribute in the same way that the nouns Prudence and Dennis do: wherever it is grammatical to have Prudence it will be grammatical to have the postwoman and where it is ungrammatical to have Prudence it will be ungrammatical to have the postwoman:

(10)aPrudence is consideratethe postwoman is considerate
bI saw PrudenceI saw the postwoman
cthey spoke to Prudencethey spoke to the postwoman
d*we Prudence Dennis*we the postwoman Dennis

With this in mind, consider the following:

(11)aPrudence pestered Dennis on Wednesday
bPrudence persisted on Wednesday

It seems that in the position where we have pestered Dennis we can have the verb persisted. This is not surprising as the verb pestered is used transitively in (11a), with a nominal complement (Dennis) whereas persisted is used intransitively in (11b), without a complement. However, if intransitive verbs distribute the same as transitive verbs plus their complements, this means that transitive verbs and their complements form a phrase that has a distribution in the same way that a determiner with its nominal complement distributed like certain nouns. Thus a more accurate description of the sentence than (9) would be:

(12)

We see here that the sentence has even more internal structure as a phrase may also contain another phrase.

Indeed, once we recognise the notion of a phrase, we can see them in many positions. For example, a string consisting of the preposition on and its nominal complement Wednesday can be replaced by the noun yesterday demonstrating that they have the same distribution. Thus, on Wednesday is also a phrase in the sentence:

(13)the postwoman pestered the doctor [on Wednesday]/yesterday

This suggests we have the following structure for this particular sentence:

(14)

Moreover, in the phrase on Wednesday, the noun Wednesday can be replaced by the words his birthday, indicating that this is also a phrasal position:

(15) the postwoman pestered the doctor on Wednesday/[his birthday]
(16)
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