adjective

a constituent with the feature composition: [+N, +V, –F] modifying nouns, e.g. mad in mad cow. These constituents cannot have nominal complements, their semantically nominal complement must appear as a Prepositional Phrase with the rescue strategy of of-insertion.

daughter

an immediate constituent of a node which then is the mother node.

determiner

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

determiner phrase (DP)

a phrase headed by a central determiner or the possessive ’s morpheme. The complement of a DP is an NP, the specifier the DP the possessive ending attaches to.

grammar

(a) a (finite) set of rules which tell us how to recognise the infinite number of expressions that constitute the language that we speak. (b) a linguistic hypothesis about these rules.

immediate constituent

the immediate constituent of a node is the node that is lower than the given constituent and is connected to it by a single branch. It is the constituent directly below the node it is the immediate constituent of.

mother

a node directly above another node.

phrase

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

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].

preposition phrase (PP)

a phrase headed by a preposition. It usually takes a DP complement but certain types of CPs can also appear in the complement position of PPs. PPs themselves can be complements of different constituents such as verbs, nouns and adjectives.

rewrite rule

a phrase structure rule defining what the immediate constituents of e.g. a phrase are. On the left of the rule we find the phrase-type being defined followed by an arrow. On the right side of the arrow we can find the immediate constituents of the given phrase, which may be further rewritten. Bracketed constituents indicate optionality, the presence of a comma means that the order of the constituents is not restricted to the order found in the rule. See also adjunct rule, specifier rule, complement rule.

tree diagram

a representation of grammatical structure containing nodes connected by branches.

verb phrase (VP)

a phrase headed by a verb. It is in the VP together with the vp(s) that the basic argument structure of the clause is formed, thus, theta-role assignment takes place here. The specifier position of the VP is occupied by the constituent bearing the theme/patient theta role. In passive structures this constituent has to move from the specifier position of the verb to the specifier position of IP in order to get Case. A VP can have different types of complements such as a DP, CP, IP, PP.

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Basic English Syntax with Exercises

2.1.7 Rules

The last thing we will mention in this section concerns the kinds of grammatical rules that could be responsible for producing structures such as in (34). Recall from the start of this section we introduced a formal rule which stated that sentences can be made up of words and other sentences:

(35)sentence → word*, sentence*

The rule states that a sentence is made up of some words and some sentences. Although this rule is not particularly accurate, we can see that this kind of rule is ideal for describing the kinds of structures we have been discussing, as they state what the immediate constituents of a structure are: in other words, this rule describes mother–daughter relationships.

From the structure in (34) it is possible to formulate the following rules:

(36)S → DP VP
VP → V DP PP
PP → P DP
DP → D N

Such rules are known as rewrite rules as they describe how to draw a tree by ‘re-writing’ the symbol on the left of the arrow for the symbols on the right. Thus, if we start with the S at the top of the tree diagram we can rewrite this as a DP and a VP. The VP can be re-written as a verb, a DP and a PP and the PP as a preposition and a DP. The DPs can then be re-written as determiners followed by nouns.

Although the system of rules in (36) is capable of describing the structures of a good number of English sentences, it is clear that we would need many more rules to attempt to describe the structures of all English sentences. For example, not every DP is made up of a determiner followed by a noun. Some may contain just a determiner, such as this for example, or a determiner, an adjective and a noun, such as a rusty kettle. A DP may indeed contain, amongst other things another sentence, such as the diagnosis that she had flu. It is clear that we would need many rewrite rules to capture all the possibilities for English DPs.

This fact does not invalidate this kind of rule for linguistic descriptive purposes. As long as there is only a finite number of rules, a legitimate grammar could be formulated even with a very large number of them. However, if human grammars are constructed of a large number of rules the question is raised of how children could ever learn their grammatical systems. This consideration has lead some linguists to assume that what is needed is a far more restricted set of rules. We will introduce the theory of phrase structure that follows this line of thought in the next chapter.

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