Basic English Syntax with Exercises

regular

1.2.3 Morphological criteria for determining category

The first two cases in (13) represent the regular plural form in English, as we have been discussing. But even here there are differences. In the first case the morpheme is pronounced [z] whereas in the second it is pronounced [s]. This is a fact about English morpho-phonemics, that certain morphemes are unvoiced following an unvoiced consonant, that we will not go into in this book. However, this does show that what we are dealing with is something more abstract than simply pronunciations. This point is made even more forcefully by the third and fourth cases. The plural form men differs from the singular man in terms of the quality of the vowel and the plural form sheep is phonetically identical to the singular form sheep. From our point of view, however, the important point is not the question of how morphological forms are realised (that is a matter for phonologists), but that the morphological forms exist. Sheep IS the plural form of sheep and so there is a morphological plural for this word, which we know therefore is a noun. There is no plural form for the word warm, even abstractly, and so we know that this is not a noun.

1.3.1 Categorial features

Before we start to look at the properties of individual categories, we will make the typology of categories described in (23) a little more systematic. One might wonder why there are these categories and why their division is so regular: four thematic categories and four functional ones. Moreover, we may have the feeling that the categories given in (23) are not completely unrelated to each other. For example, it is often felt that nouns and verbs are somehow opposites of each other or that adjectives have some things in common with nouns and other things in common with verbs. Even across the thematic/functional divide, we may see similarities. For example, words like the, these and some are determiners and these seem more related to nouns, which they usually accompany, than to verbs. Modal auxiliary verbs, such as may, can and must, which as we will see are classified as belonging to the inflections, are obviously more closely related to verbs than nouns.

1.3.4.1 Verbs

The different forms of a word are known as its inflections and we say that verbs inflect for tense in that different forms represent tense distinctions. As discussed earlier, not all inflectional forms are regular and, especially in the past tense, we have irregular forms:

1.3.4.1 Verbs

The progressive aspect is fortunately more regular and, in fact, it is always formed by adding ing to the stem. Finally, verbs have a passive form as well. This is always identical to the perfective however:

1.3.4.2 Nouns

Like verbs there is a fair amount of deviation from the regular morphological representation of the plural [s]. Again, we will ignore the morphological irregularities and treat these forms as being syntactically stem + plural:

1.3.4.2 Nouns

As seems clear, most nouns that are formed from verbs take exactly the same complements as the original verb does. The one difference can be seen in (87e) where the verb takes a nominal complement while the noun takes a prepositional one. Note that the verb and its complement express exactly the same relationship as the noun and its complement: in both cases it is ‘the bomb’ that gets detonated. Thus, the preposition of in the case of the noun complement does not seem to add anything of a semantic nature. Moreover, this is an entirely regular process – any verb that has a nominal complement will take a prepositional complement (with of) when it is formed into a noun:

1.3.5.1 Inflections

One argument in support of this treatment of finite inflections concerns the difference between inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes, discussed above. A derivational morpheme forms a new word from an existent one in the lexicon. This new word has lexical properties of its own and may even differ in its meaning from the original word. Furthermore, the process tends to be limited, applying to a selection of lexical elements rather than to whole classes. Inflectional morphology, on the other hand, does not change the lexical element, it just provides another form of that word. Often, it adds some element of meaning (such as tense or plural) to the meaning of the original word rather than changing the meaning to something else. This all suggests that the two processes are very different and that derivational morphology is something that goes on in the lexicon to expand the number of available words. Inflectional morphology is, on the other hand, too regular to be a lexical process, applying to whole categories. This would seem to be the hallmark of a syntactic process not a lexical one. We will assume therefore that verbal morphemes expressing tense and agreement are independent words inserted into a sentence in their own position and undergo a subsequent syntactic process which combines them with the verb that they are attached to.

2.1.3 Sentences within phrases

From what we have said so far we might think that English expressions are organised with sentences at the top, phrases in the middle and words at the bottom. Unfortunately things are not quite so regular. As we have seen, sentences can appear within sentences. A typical way for this to happen is to have a sentence as part of a phrase which itself is part of the bigger sentence. For example, instead of the phrase pestered the doctor in (12) we might have another phrase: