Basic English Syntax with Exercises

syntax

1.2.4 Distribution

Let us turn now to the observations made in (2) and (3). There we observed that there are certain positions in a sentence that some words can occupy and other words cannot. Clearly, this is determined by category. This is perhaps the most basic point of word categories as far as syntax is concerned. The grammar of a language determines how we construct the expressions of the language. The grammar, however, does not refer to the individual words of the lexicon, telling us, for example, that the word cat goes in position X in expression Y. Such a system would not be able to produce an indefinite number of sentences as there would have to be such a rule for every expression of the language. Instead, the grammar defines the set of possible positions for word categories, hence allowing the construction of numerous expressions from a small number of grammatical principles. The question of how these positions are defined is mostly what this book is about, but for now, for illustrative purposes only, let us pretend that English has a rule that says that a sentence can be formed by putting a noun in front of a verb. This rule then tells us that the expressions in (15) are grammatical and those in (16) are not:

5.1 Event Structure and Aspect

While this is a very interesting and complex part of the description of the semantics of English verbal complexes, we will not have very much to say about it in this book, as we are mainly interested in syntax and in semantics only inasmuch as it has an effect on the syntactic organisation of an expression. For us, the main interest in grammatical aspect is to do with the appearance of the auxiliary verbs and their syntactic distributions and properties.

6.5 Conclusion

In this chapter we have discussed the basic architecture of the clause, claiming that this is headed by the inflectional element. This analysis provides positions for both the subject and the VP as well as the inflectional element itself. However, there are aspects of the syntax of the clause that we have not yet touched upon. We have yet to discuss the position of the complementiser, for example. Furthermore, there are types of clauses that we have not discussed: interrogatives, for example. These will be discussed in the next chapters.