![]() ![]() Conjunction words bind adjuncts together, and complements together. *I will do so the letter before the party (Compl is stranded: invalid)Ĭonsider another part of speech we have not yet considered: conjunction words like “and” and “or”.ĭifference #3.I will do so in the office before the party (Adj is stranded: valid).Indexing replacement cannot strand the complement. *I will read in the office before the party the letter (Compl reorder: invalid)ĭifference #2.I will read the letter before the party in the office (Adj reorder: valid).I will read the letter in the office before the party (Original order: valid).This rule means that our two adjuncts can be shuffled, but the complement NP must retain its original position Let us look at four behavioral differences:ĭifference #1. The distinction between adjuncts and complements explains why this should be the case. Given that adjuncts and complements both often inhabit prepositional phrases, it is perhaps surprising that they should behave differently. Adjuncts, on the other hand, tend to feel more optional (e.g., “big” in “big book”).The complement tends to feel intimately related to the head of a phrase (e.g., “of poems” in “a book of poems”).For verbs, adverbs occasionally fill this role (“quickly”). For nouns, specifiers include determiners (“the”) and possessives (“her”). Consider the sentence “The tall student who is wearing the red shirt asked questions of her professor, after the lecture.” The central meaning is retained if we remove all non-head words: “student asked questions”. The head carries the central meaning of the phrase.There are only four kinds of phrase constituents: What if noun and verb phrases are instantiations of a more general phrase structure? Just as group theory identifies overlap in the axioms of addition and subtraction, X-bar theory explores the similarity between NP and VP rules. We can revise our original NP and VP rules to reflect our intermediate N’ and V’ nodes: I will do so in the office before the party.The X-Bar syntax tree provides a simple explanation of the “do so” substitution effects: We can similarly introduce depth to our verb phrases (VPs), by using intermediate V’ (“V-bar”) nodes: This new tree successfully predicts all substitution phenomena, by modeling “one” as replacing various “N-bar” nodes: We will call these intermediate nodes N’, (where N → N’ → N’’ = NP): Perhaps we need additional nodes to describe structure within the noun phrase. Perhaps our notion of noun phrases is too flat. I bought that big one of poems with the blue cover.I bought one (“one” replaces the entire noun phrase)īut there are several other substitutions don’t follow from branch replacement:. ![]() I bought that big one of poems with the red cover (“one” replaces the noun).The meaning of these words can be obtained from the context.Īt first glance, indexing replacement seems to target a branch in the syntax tree. In everyday language, we often replace words and phrases with indexing words like “one”. Followup To: An Introduction to Generative SyntaxĬonsider the sentence “I bought this big book of poems with the red cover”. ![]()
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