Basic English Syntax with Exercises

number

1.3.4.1 Verbs

In (54) the verb has the same past tense inflection in all permutations of the sentence, but in (55) there is a difference between the first example and all the others. This corresponds to the fact that the argument which precedes the verb in the first case is third person and singular and in all other cases this argument is either plural or first or second person (I or you). This argument is called the subject and we will discuss its nature and properties in the next chapter. For now we will simply use the term to refer to the argument in front of the verb without further discussion. The morphological phenomenon shown in (55) is known as agreement. We say that the verb agrees with certain features (number and person) of the subject (later on, we will see that it is the inflection that agrees with the subject and that this is independent of the verb). English does not demonstrate much in the way of agreement inflection. For the vast majority of verbs it is only in the present tense and with a third person singular argument that the verb has an agreement form. The exception is the verb to be, for which there are three present tense forms (first person singular, third person singular and the rest) and two past tense forms (first and third person singular and the rest):

1.3.4.2 Nouns

Besides morphological irregularity, there are also a number of problematic cases. Some nouns express concepts for which number distinctions are not normally made. For example, sand refers to stuff that naturally comes in a quantity for which the division into ‘one’ (singular) and ‘more than one’ (plural) is not particularly natural. Nouns which naturally accommodate this distinction are known as count nouns and those that do not are called mass nouns. If we wish to individuate mass nouns, we usually do this in terms of another noun which names a unit of what the mass noun refers to and put this into a more complicated construction, known as the partitive:

1.3.5.2 Determiners

Determiners are often marked for number. So, a, this and that are singular whilst these and those are plural, only introducing nouns with the relevant number:

1.3.5.2 Determiners

With mass nouns, for which number is not applicable, we can have neither singular nor plural determiners (unless we treat the mass noun as a count noun, referring to types or groups of the material that the noun refers to – see the discussion in section 2.1.3.):

1.3.5.2 Determiners

The definite determiner the can be used in either singular or plural contexts and even those unmarked for number, when used with mass nouns:

1.3.5.2 Determiners

A related concept to number is quantity and determiners often act as quantifiers for the nouns they introduce:

1.3.5.2 Determiners

These quantificational determiners are also often marked for number, introducing only certain types of noun:

2.2.1 The subject

Hungarian verbal morphology is a good deal more complex than this, though it is not my intention to go into it here. The point is that although English has less agreement morphology than Hungarian, the phenomenon is the same in that the form of the verb reflects person and number properties of the subject. In English, the other arguments have no effect on the form of the verb:

4.1 Why the Noun is not the Head of the DP

As is is the form of the verb ‘to be’ that agrees with a third person singular subject and are is the form agreeing with a third person plural one, we can conclude that the phrases sitting in subject positions have these properties. Thus it would seem that the noun projects its number features to the whole phrase. We have said that projection is something that concerns heads and so this might be taken as evidence that the noun is the head.

4.1 Why the Noun is not the Head of the DP

Again, however, this is not an entirely unproblematic assumption. Many determiners carry number features of their own:

4.1 Why the Noun is not the Head of the DP

In these cases both the nouns and the determiners are marked for number and so it is difficult to say where the number feature of the whole phrase is projected from. Indeed, even in those cases such as (8a) and (8b) where it looks as though the number is projected from the noun, we could argue that the determiner the is ambiguously marked for singular or plural and, like the other determiners, when it is singular it can only accompany a singular noun and when it is plural it can only accompany a plural noun. The issue therefore rests on which we take to be the head: the determiner or the noun. For this reason, we cannot use these observations to argue in favour of one or the other having head status but we must look elsewhere to resolve the issue.

4.2.1 Determiners and Complements

As we have seen, the determiner may impose restrictions on its NP complement, particularly in terms of number: singular determiners take singular NP complements and plural determiners take plural NP complements. Some determiners take mass NP complements, and we have seen that the empty definite determiner takes a proper NP complement:

4.2.1 Determiners and Complements

As we have pointed out, only indefinite DPs can appear in the post-verbal position in there sentences. Interestingly, in this construction the verb appears to agree with the post-verbal element. So in (36a) the post-verbal DP is indefinite, the sentence being grammatical, and the verb is in the plural form. The determiner some is an indefinite plural determiner and these properties are projected to the whole phrase. The determiner a is indefinite and singular and hence the DP that it heads can go in the post-verbal position of a there sentence and the verb will be in its singular form, as in (36b). The determiner the is definite, but unmarked for number. Therefore it cannot head a DP in the post-verbal position of a there sentence (36c), but it can trigger either singular or plural agreement on the verb when it sits in the canonical subject position, (36d) and (36e), depending on what NP it takes as a complement.

6.1 The structure of IP

For inflections what determines the agreement form of the inflection is the person and number properties of the subject. With a third person and singular subject the inflection is realised as (e)s and with any other subject it has a null realisation:

6.2.3 Tense and Agreement

In this paradigm, the past tense is represented uniformly as an independent morpheme t and the agreement morphemes differ depending on the person and number of the subject.

7.3.2 Wh-movement

We have seen in a number of previous places that the head and the specifier have a special relationship. In the IP where the subject sits in the specifier and the agreement morpheme sits in the head position, the two elements ‘agree’ with each other in terms of number and person features. Thus if the subject is a third person singular element, then the agreement will be third person singular and determine that the finite morpheme ‘s’ will show up on the verb. In the DP, the possessor sits in the specifier position and this can only be accompanied by a determiner that ‘agrees’ with it in terms of possession. We might assume therefore that the CP will be no different and that the head and its specifier will enter into an agreement relationship, presumably in terms of the [+wh] feature. So, if the specifier has this feature, so will the head. Of course, if the head has the feature, then it will project it to the CP and this will be interpreted as an interrogative clause, and hence the wh-specifier can indeed influence the interpretation of the clause in a round-about manner: