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  • Weve seen that sentences have an internal structure. They consist of constituents which

  • themselves may consist of smaller constituents. So far, weve looked at it in a kind of

  • theoretical way. But now, we can take that and put it into practice, and the question

  • is going to be then, if you have a sequence of words, if you have a string of words, how

  • can you determine what the constituents are that make up that string? What is the evidence

  • for a certain sequence of words being a constituent or not being a constituent? That is to say,

  • are there diagnostics for constituent structure that can be applied?

  • The main two diagnostics that can be used to work out what the constituent structure

  • of a sentence or a phrase is, are, on the one hand, whether that sequence that youre

  • looking at can be replaced by a single word. So that’s one family of tests for constituency:

  • replacement or substitution testswhether you can replace the sequence that youre

  • concerned with by a single word.

  • And the other main class of tests for constituency is movement or displacement, that is, can

  • that same sequence of words that youre looking at and trying to work out whether

  • it’s a constituent, can that sequence of words be moved within the sentence, can it

  • be displaced and occur somewhere else, while the meaning of the whole sentence is more

  • or less preserved? That may not make a lot of sense at the moment, but youll see some

  • examples. So those are the two main types of test that can be used for constituency.

  • When weve looked at those, well look at some others as well.

  • Now were looking at how we can diagnose constituency, and in particular starting with

  • the test that we can call substitution or replacement.

  • Noun phrases are one kind of phrase, a phrase that’s built round a noun, evidently. And

  • that’s the general pattern, that inside each phrase there’s one distinguished word

  • that gives the phrase its category. So we have noun phrases which are built around nouns.

  • Well see that you have adjective phrases built around adjectives, prepositional phrases

  • built around prepositions. That distinguished word within a phrase is called the head of

  • the phrase. Other terminology that gets used for this is to say that a word projects a

  • phrase. So a noun projects a noun phrase; an adjective projects an adjective phrase.

  • So a noun projects a noun phrase; the noun is head of that phrase.

  • One reason for saying that the noun is thedistinguishedword within the noun phrase

  • is that it’s the word that is least likely to be omitted. So this is characteristic of

  • heads of phrases. So there are lots of sizes of noun phrases. We can have, for example,

  • uh, just the wordcats’, so we could sayCats are lovely”. We can also say

  • Intelligent cats are lovely”; we can sayCats with long tails are lovely”,

  • orIntelligent cats with long tails are lovely”. In all of these, of course, weve

  • got the wordcats’. If we omit that, we’d wind up thingswind up with things

  • likeintelligent with long tails are lovelyorwith long tails are lovely”, and those

  • are ungrammatical. So in this case we see that it’s the head of the phrase that has

  • to be there, that can’t be omitted. And that’s typical, perhaps not entirely universal,

  • but a typical property of the head of the phrase.

  • A second fact about the head of the phrase is that it shares grammatical properties with

  • the phrase. Weve already seen that it shares the category, so a noun is the head of a noun

  • phrase, so that grammatical category of noun is shared between head and phrase, but other

  • grammatical properties may be projected from the head to the phrase. One property, for

  • example, is plurality. For example, you could take in English a phrase likethe dog”.

  • The dogis singular, and you can tell because if you add a verb you get singular

  • agreement on the verb. So you’d sayThe dog is waitingand notThe dog are waiting”.

  • Of course, you would sayThe dogs are waiting”. So the noun phrase there is plural, and notice,

  • because the head is plural. We could take another noun phrase like, uhm, “seven heads”.

  • Right, so that’s pluralyou’d sayseven heads are better than one”. Now,

  • we can make a larger noun phrase; weve seen that you can have phrases inside phrases,

  • so we could have a larger noun phrase where you’d put these together. So we’d get

  • something likethe dog with seven heads”. Now notice what happens if you try to make

  • a verb agree with that. Youll getthe dog with seven heads was waiting”, notthe

  • dog with seven heads were waiting”. So despite the fact thatheads’, which is plural,

  • is close to the verb, it’s not what the verb is agreeing with. The verb is sensitive

  • to the number that is determined by the head of the phrase and the head of the whole noun

  • phrasethe dog with seven headsisdog’, which is singular. So the number of the head

  • inside the phrase determines the number of the whole phrase.

  • In English we can see this with plurality. There are other grammatical properties which

  • can be determined by the head of the noun phrase. Uh, we don’t see in English, but

  • in many languages nouns are divided into a number of classes which are sometimes called

  • genders. In different languages the number of different genders, the number of these

  • formal classes of nouns varies. Uhm, you may be familiar with French, which has two distinct

  • genders, masculine and feminine, and all nouns fall into one or other of those classes. And

  • again, just like plurality in English and, in fact, plurality in French, the gender of

  • a noun phrase is determined by the gender of the head. And one way to see this is that

  • other words also agree with it, so we saw that in English the verb agrees in number

  • with the number of the noun phrase that’s the subject. In French we get also agreement

  • in gender on adjectives. So you could have a sentence like, uhm, “Lare est morte.”

  • So ‘mère’, mother, is feminine, it makes the whole noun phrase feminine, and the adjective

  • mortehas a ‘tesound at the end which is the feminine agreement. On the other

  • hand, if you had a masculine word like, uhm, ‘Georges’, the man’s nameGeorge’,

  • that would be masculine, and if you wanted to sayGeorge is dead”, you would get

  • Georges est mort”, without thattesound at the end. So again, thein this

  • case the gender of the head determines the gender of the whole phrase. And again we can

  • build up a larger phrase, so we could haveLare de Georges” (the mother of Georges),

  • and if we now see what gender we get on the adjective, we getLare de Georges est

  • morte”, again with the feminine ending. So there again, although the word that’s

  • closest to the adjective is masculine, the agreement that you get on the adjective is

  • feminine, because the whole noun phrase (“the mother of Georges”), the agreement that

  • you get on the adjective is feminine, because the whole noun phrase, ‘the mother of George’,

  • the gender of that is determined by the nounmother’. So there again we see a grammatical

  • property of a head of a phrase projected to the whole phrase.

  • There’s a classic example in the literature that relies on this property of heads. If

  • you take the phraseVisiting relatives can be boring”, it’s actually ambiguous,

  • there’s two quite distinct meanings. So on the one hand it means something likerelatives

  • who visit can be boring”, and on the other hand it means something quite different, that

  • is going to see relatives yourself can be boring.

  • So it has these two meanings. But notice it’s a property of the wordcanthat it actually

  • doesn’t show agreement for singular or plural. So you saythe boy canandthe boys

  • can”. But if you take a verb that does show a difference, now we can see the ambiguity

  • actually splitting up. So you’d sayVisiting relatives is boringorVisiting relatives

  • are boring”. And those two sentences now, each one only has one of the meanings. And

  • youve got that different agreement. And what’s happening there is that where you

  • getVisiting relatives are boring”, on that reading where it’s the relatives who

  • are boring, ‘relativesis the head of the noun phrasevisiting relatives”.

  • It’s plural, so the whole noun phrase is plural and you get plural agreement.

  • But with the other meaning, where it meansto visit relatives is boring”, in that

  • case the nounvisitingis the head of the noun phrase, and that is singular, so

  • you get singular agreement on the verb. So there you see a very minimal example which

  • shows that the head of the noun phrase is determining the number on the noun, and in

  • this case it goes with a very real difference in the meaning of the noun phrase as a whole.

  • So that’s some properties of phrases and heads of phrases, and in particular of noun

  • phrases, but now to get back to the question of the diagnostic for noun phrases, and in

  • particular the diagnostic of substitution or replacement. A characteristic of noun phrases,

  • then, is that they can be replaced by a single word which is called a ‘pronoun’. So that’s

  • what pronouns do. Notice that although we call them pronouns, it’s actually a bad

  • term, because a pronoun doesn’t replace a nounit replaces a whole noun phrase.

  • So, for example, if you take a sentence likeJohn saw the boy who fed the cats”. We

  • could replace the whole sequencethe boy who fed the catswith the pronounhim’.

  • SoJohn saw the boy who fed the cats. I saw him too.” Andhimis referring

  • to that whole sequence (“the boy who fed the cats”), so that tells us it’s a noun

  • phrase.

  • Notice that you could also sayJohn saw the boy who fed the cats. I saw the girl who

  • fed them”, where nowthemis replacingthe cats’. So that is also a constituent;

  • it’s also a noun phrase. So, should we be worried that we have one diagnostic which

  • saysthe boy who fed the catsis a noun phrase and another diagnostic that saysthe

  • catsis a noun phrase? Well, obviously not, because weve seen that phrases can

  • contain other phrases. Constituents contain constituents. And in particular we have recursive

  • cases of this, that a noun phrase can contain another noun phrase. And this is just one

  • example of that.

  • Weve looked a bit now at noun phrases, at phrases headed by nouns. Now we can look

  • at another kind of phrase, a prepositional phrase. That is, a phrase headed by a preposition.

  • Prepositions in English include words likein’, ‘on’, ‘after’, and so on.

  • It’s actually a bit unfortunate that we have this word preposition, because it includes

  • within it the ordering the preposition has with respect to the phrase it combines with.

  • So in English, prepositions precede the phrase they combine with, so we getin London”,

  • from Japan”, “to Edinburgh”: preposition followed by a noun phrase.

  • In other languages you have postpositions, that is, the equivalent kind of word, but

  • that follows the phrase that it combines with.

  • In Japanese, you’d find that the equivalent of a preposition occurs after the noun phrase

  • it combines with. So in English we’d sayto Tokyo”; in Japanese you’d sayTokyo

  • e” orTokyo ni”, and the same with all of the equivalent words. By calling them

  • prepositions versus postpositions, it makes it sound like it’s two different categories.

  • What we’d really want to say is that there’s a single category which we could call adpositions.

  • And that in English they go before the thing they combine with; in Japanese they go after.

  • But preposition and postposition are very well-established terms, so well stick to

  • those for the moment.

  • So in English, our adpositions are prepositions; they come before the thing that they combine

  • with, which is typically a noun phrase, although well see that there are examples of prepositions

  • combining with other categories.

  • Prepositions can express different kinds of concepts. Prepositions that relate to location,

  • or locative prepositions, when those combine with phrases, the result can often be replaced

  • by a locative expression likethereorhere’. So, I could say, for example,

  • “I went to Philadelphia in 1985. I went there in 1985.” “I came to Edinburgh in

  • 2002. I came here in 2002.” So locative prepositional phrases can often be replaced

  • withhereorthere’. Other prepositions can denote things to do with time, and these

  • temporal phrases that result can also be replaced often with a temporal word likethen’.

  • So, we could sayShe lived in Philadelphia in 2008. She lived in Philadelphia then.”

  • We could do both, soShe lived in Philadelphia in 2008. She lived there then.” Weve

  • replaced the two prepositional phrases with these two words: ‘thereandthen’.

  • Other prepositions denote other concepts than time or place. So, for example, there’s

  • a prepositionfor’. It has many uses, but you could say “I did this for my aunt”.

  • There’s no single word that can replacefor my aunt’. We still think it’s a

  • prepositional phrase, but it doesn’t have a corresponding single word, likethere

  • orthen’. Well see later on, though, that there are other diagnostics that we can

  • use to show that it is indeed a phrase.

  • Weve seen noun phrases headed by nouns. Weve seen prepositional phrases headed

  • by prepositions. Another type of phrase is an adjective phrase. An adjective could be

  • a word likeillorloud’, and these could be expanded to make larger phrases.

  • So we could say, for example, “Mary is extremely illorThat noise is too loud to be

  • tolerable”. “Extremely illis an adjective phrase” — “too loud to be tolerable”…

  • also an adjective phrase.

  • For some speakers, these adjective phrases can be replaced by the formso’. For

  • such speakers, you could sayMarion seems extremely ill, and Bill is so too”, where

  • sopicks upextremely ill”. But not every speaker usessoin this way.

  • Not every speaker accepts that. I myself find don’t find it very natural. For speakers

  • who do have that use ofso’, it’s a good diagnostic for an adjective phrase. At

  • least, even for such speakers, though, there is a caveat here. Adjective phrases appear

  • in two main types of position. You can use adjective phrases attributively or predicatively.

  • What that means is, to use something predicatively, to use an adjective phrase predicatively is

  • to use it in a phrase likeMarion is illorThe mantlepiece is dusty”. To use

  • it attributively is to use it within the noun phrase, so “a very ill womanor “a

  • dusty mantlepiece”.

  • And even speakers who can usesoto replace adjective phrases, can only do so

  • when those adjective phrases appear in the predicative position, so youll have speakers

  • who can sayShe is very tall, and my brother is so toobut the same speakers don’t

  • accept, for example, “I saw a very tall man, and she saw a so woman”. So that use

  • ofsois restricted to adjective phrases in predicative position for the speakers who

  • can use it.

  • And the final type of phrase that well consider now is a phrase headed by a verb,

  • a verb phrase. Verb phrases can occur in various positions. An example would beTo insult

  • your mother is disgraceful”. “Insult your motherthere is a verb phrase. OrJenny

  • will attend the conference”. “Attend the conferenceis a verb phrase. OrLaura

  • painted a portrait of the dog”. “Painted a portrait of the dogis a verb phrase.

  • The substitution that you can do for verb phrases is actually not with a single word.

  • Verb phrases can often be replaced with the formdo so’. So for example you can say

  • To insult your mother is disgraceful. To do so is disgraceful.” Soinsult your

  • motherthere we saw is a verb phrase, and indeed we can replace it withdo so’.

  • OrJennifer will attend the conference. I will do so too. I will attend the conference

  • too.” So we can see thatattend the conferenceis also a verb phrase.

  • OrLaura painted a portrait of the dog. Her sister did so too. Her sister painted

  • a portrait of the dog too.” Sopainted a portrait of the dog”: also a verb phrase

  • as you can see, a complex verb phrase which contains a noun phrase inside it. So

  • do sois the form that can substitute for an entire verb phrase.

Weve seen that sentences have an internal structure. They consist of constituents which

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A2 初級 英國腔

生成文法 2.1:代替成分 (Generative Syntax 2.1: Substituting Constituents)

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    Liu Yoga 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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