Download Chapter Two Syntactic Categories

Chapter Two
Syntactic Categories
Syntactic categories are of two types:
Lexical categories (N, V, P, A, AdP) and
functional categories (IP, CP, DP)
Lexical categories
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Noun Phrase (NP)
Verb Phrase (VP)
Preposition Phrase (PP)
Adjective Phrase (AP)
Adverb Phrase (AdP)
• Noun Phrase (NP)
• NP is available in all natural languages including
English, e.g. John, man, family, and father-in-law.
It also includes the pronouns he, she, you, them,
etc. It functions as a subject or object in the
sentence. The noun phrase like these is called an
‘argument’ and is assigned meaning (theta role)
and case (nominative, accusative, or genitive) as
will be seen later. Technically, the nouns of one
word structure along with the compound nouns
are equally called noun phrases.
• Verb Phrase (VP)
• Verb phrases contain a lexical verb, which is either
followed by other categories or not. Examples for
illustration are:
• They traveled.
• They traveled to Mecca.
• John rewarded Mary a nice reward yesterday.
• The underlined verbs in the sentences above are verb
phrases. Such verb phrases can appear as stative, i.e.
they are followed by a complement but with no object.
Transitive verb phrases, i.e. those which accept only
one object (John wrote the lesson), or ditransitive verb
phrase (John gave Mary a book.)
• Preposition Phrase (PP)
• It is the phrase that comprises a preposition
and a noun as its complement, e.g.
• I met John at school.
• Adjective Phrase (AP)
• This phrase is composed of an adjective which
usually modifies a noun, e.g.
• John is clever.
• Adverb Phrase (AdP)
• It modifies the verb in the sentence, e.g.
• John came quickly.
• Functional categories
• Complementizer Phrase (CP)
• Inflection Phrase (IP)
• Complementizer Phrase (CP)
• This phrase is a functional category and is
headed by a complementiser like; the relative
pronouns. Consider:
• I met the teacher who taught me English at
the secondary school.
• Who in (1), like the rest of relative pronouns,
is counted as a complementizer and functions
as a head of the complementizer phrase.
However the wh.NPs like what, who etc locate
at the specifier of the CP as will be seen later.
• Inflection Phrase (IP)
• It is of the following constituents: tense, person,
number, gender, aspect, case, and mood The
English IP contains tense, e.g. present, past. The
stem of the verb must be inflected with one of
them. Person is the next feature of the inflection
(subject-verb agreement ‘s’). Number is a basic
feature of the inflection phrase. However, it is
along with gender not available overtly in the
English IP, whereas it is available in Arabic, and
other languages. Consider the following example
from Arabic:
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2a. Tal9ab al-bint-u
Feminine-play the-girl
The girl plays.
b. Yal9ab al-walad
Masculine-play the-boy
The boy plays.
c. Al-awlad-u yal9ab-uun
The- boys play-3MP
‘The boys are playing’
• Case is visibly (overtly) seen in personal
pronouns, e.g. he, him, his, and the ‘s’ genitive
case in English, e.g. John’s book, while nominative
and accusative cases appear covertly (invisibly) in
English. However, the three cases appear overtly
in Standard Arabic.
• According to the split-inflection hypothesis the
IP is split into other phrases. Theses are like:
• Agreement subject Phrase (AgrsP)
• Tense Phrase (TP)
• Aspect Phrase (AsP)
• Mood Phrase (MP)
• Agreement object Phrase (AgroP)
• Heads
• One of the main properties of the phrases above
is that every phrase has a head. the verb (V) is the
head of VP. the inflection (I) is the head of IP, the
noun (N) is the head of NP, the adjective (A) is the
head of AP, the adverb (Ad) is the head of AdP,
and the complementizer (C) is the head of CP.
• The head in the phrases above is responsible of
projecting the other constituents of the phrase
following it, e.g. the grammatical properties of
the VP are determined by the verb.
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Consider the following examples:
The boy plays tennis.
*the tennis plays.
The sentence in (b) above is ill-formed
because the projected words precede the
projector (i.e. the verb plays). The mechanism
of projection is interpreted by the fist
submodule of GBT called X-bar theory.
X-bar theory
• X-bar theory (=Principles and Parameters
theory) is considered as a basic module of GB.
It is centrally concerned with D-structure
representations and the imposition of certain
constraints on them. It may also be involved at
S-structure in cases of adjunction Horrocks
(1987:101) maintains:
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• X-bar theory provides principles for the
projection of phrasal
• categories from lexical categories and imposes
conditions on
• the hierarchical organizations of categories in the
form of general
• schemata
• Such schemata can be formulated according to
Chomsky (1989: ) as in (3) below:
• 3)
a. X’ = XX”*
• b. X’ = X’X”*
• c. X” = X”*X’
The schemata in (3) can be represented
diagrammatically as in (4) below:
X”
(spec)
X’
X’
X
(adjunct)
complement
• The maximal projection XP (X”), in (3), is
projected from the first level projection X' (X-bar)
combining with an optional specifier. Chomsky
(1986a). The X' is optionally projected from
another X' in combination with adjunct. X' is
projected from X (the head) and a complement.
• Furthermore, the order of the head and its
complement and that of the X' projection and its
specifier are subject to cross linguistic variation;
this variation is generally assumed to follow from
the values assigned to the head parameter in (5a)
below and to the specifier parameter in (5b):
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(5a)
The Head Parameter
(i) X' = YP2 - X (head final)
(ii) X' = X - YP2 (head initial)
(b) The Specifier Parameter
(i) XP = YP -X' (Specifier initial)
(ii) XP = X' - YP (Specifier final)
• These principles show that a large range of
structures of various languages may be
accounted for in a straightforward way. These
could include English, Arabic, Turkish,
Japanese, etc.
• Further, we might suppose that an adjunct
parameter can have two values:
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• 6a. Adjunct final
• b. Adjunct initial
• The parameters and values given above define
logical space of eight possible phrase
structures. For example, English and Arabic
are head initial languages, while Dutch and
Japanese are head final. (cf Hoekstra, 1991,
and Souali, 1992). English and Arabic are also
specifier-initial languages while Bulgarian is a
specifier-final language. (cf Travis, 1989, and
Atkinson 1992).
• A further observation related to X-bar theory is
that the variable X, according to Chomsky
(1986b), and Abney,(1987), among others ranges
over not only lexical categories e.g. N,V,A,P, etc,
but also cover non-lexical categories namely
Inflection (I), Complementizer (C), determiner
(D). Other functional categories are added
recently within the Split-Inflection framework...
namely agreement (Agr), tense (T), aspect (ASP),
negation (NEG), quantifier (Q). (cf Pollock, 1989
and Ouhalla, 1991, Shlonsky, 1981, Chomsky,
1991, Mahajan, 1992, Johns, 1992, and many
others).
• Furthermore, the X-bar theory described
above allows a single head to have more than
one complement. Therefore complements are
considered sisters of heads. Consistent with
this the representation of an X with two or
more complements is allowed to be as in (7):
X’
X
YP
ZP
• The structure in (7) represents what so called
the multiple complement hypothesis (MCH).
In dealing with double object construction this
hypothesis leads to the adoption of the flat
structure in (7) above (cf Chomsky, 1981: 48,
Barss and Lasnik, 1986, Baker, 1988b, Napoli,
1992, among others).
• After briefing the X-bar theory let’s now
identify the syntactic projections of the head,
starting with VP. The verb (V) projects a verb
bar (V’) to be a place for the adverb in the tree
diagram as appears below. Then the V’
projects a VP as a maximal projection. The
maximal projection has a specifier to the left.
In English and Arabic. The specifier position is
the place of the subject at D-structure. Then
the (V) as a head has a complement to the
right. Consider the tree diagram below.
VP
Specifier
V’
V
Adjunct
Complement
Inflection Phrase
• Inflection Phrase is another functional
category and is analyzed syntactically in two
ways:
The non-inflection hypothesis, which deals
with IP as one phrase (One maximal
projection). This type is represented
diagrammatically as below
IP
Specifier
I’
I
adjunct
complement
• Note that the adjunct position at I’ can be
occupied in case of having an adverb before
the verb. Consider the example below:
• He directly responded to them
• Here the position of the adverb directly is n I’
position to the left.
IP
I’
NP
Specifier
he
Adv.
I
directly Responded
PP
to them
• The second hypothesis is called the split
inflection hypothesis and divides the inflection
phrase into its minimal parts considering each
part as a phrase (a maximal projection) such
parts as mentioned above are : Agreement
subject Phrase (AgrSP), Tense Phrase (TP),
Aspect Phrase (AspP), Agreement Phrase
(AgrOP). Following this classification,
sentences may be diagrammatically
represented as follows:
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Complementizer Phrase •
• Complementizer Phrase (CP) is represented
diagrammatically as follows
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• The diagram above shows that the verb was
originally based at (V) position lower on the tree
(at deep-structure) then it moves to (I) position to
be inflected with tense, leaving a trace (t). Then
the noun phrase in the specifier of VP position
moves to IP specifier position then it terminates
at the specifier of CP leaving traces on the IP and
VP specifier positions. A point to notice is that
the movement occurs from head to head position
and from specifier to specifier position and every
moved element leaves a trace.
• Still, there is another type of movement that
differs from the minimal movement above. This
is called long distance movement. Consider the
movement of the logical object (direct object in
the sentence below.
• .‫ارتباط‬doc
• Here the object lower in the tree moves long
distance movement directly to the specifier of CP
(what) changing the declarative sentence into a
question.
• Movement is free everywhere in natural
languages unless the moved element meets a
barrier or bounding node. The barriers in English
are NP and IP and the condition for movement
which is called subjacency condition is stated as
“No constituent can be moved out of more than
one bounding node.” For convenience, consider
the following example:
• a) [who [did [Mary have [the assumption [t that [John
saw t]]]]]]
• CP
IP
NP
CP
IP
It is assumed that the wh-phrase first moves to the
intermediate (spec, CP) position as shown in (a) above.
However, its subsequent move to the matrix (spec, CP)
crossing NP and IP violates the principle of subjacency
above. Of course, the case of long distance movement
mentioned earlier obeys the subjacency condition.
Now consider the grammatical sentence in (b) below.
• [who [do [you [assume [t that [John saw t]]]]]
• CP
IP
CP
IP
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• Noun Phrase
• The noun phrase in English along with the NPs in
all natural languages is called an argument as
mentioned earlier, but if it occurs either in the
specifier or the complement position and has a
referential function (i.e. meaning). However, the
expletives (it and there) are not arguments.
• 1. It is there. (argument)
• 2. It seems that the bus is approaching.
(non-argument)
• The noun phrase has the same structured
representation as the previous phrases.
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