Basic English Syntax with Exercises

constituency test

2.3.1 Substitution

Given this similarity, we might take the words do so to be a pronoun which replaces VPs and hence we can test whether a constituent is a VP by seeing if it can be replaced by do so.

2.3.1 Substitution

As we can see the pronoun for APs is so, though as it is restricted to predicative APs and it also plays a role in Pronominalising VPs, we might consider it as a general pronoun for replacing predicates. Nevertheless it can still be used as a constituent test as anything that functions as a predicate is a constituent of one type or another.

2.3.2 Movement

It therefore follows that anything that moves is a constituent, and we can use movement phenomena to test assumptions about the structure of a sentence. For example, the movement involved in topicalising the object in (98) can be taken as support that the object is a constituent of this sentence.

2.3.3 Coordination

Again we can turn these observations round to provide a test for structural analyses. If we claim that a certain part of a sentence constitutes a phrase, then to test this claim we could take another similar element and see if the two things can be coordinated. Thus, to go back to the structure proposed in (100), there are three constituents proposed: the subject DP, the VP and the object DP inside the VP. If this is accurate, we should be able to find an element to coordinate with these constituents to form grammatical sentences:

2.3.3 Coordination

The coordination test, however, needs to be carefully applied. Recall that the way coordination works is to take two elements and form them into a single element that has the same function as the two elements would have individually. It therefore follows that two elements cannot be coordinated if they do not have the same function, even though they may be constituents of the same category. For example, if we tried to coordinate a PP that was a locative modifier of a DP with one which was an instrumental modifier of a VP the result would be ungrammatical: