Name: Generative Syntax 2.1: Substituting Constituents
Uploaded: 2016-10-17T13:16:49.000Z
Duration: 19 min 30 s
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We’ve seen that sentences have an internal structure. They consist of constituents which

The comparative

themselves may consist of smaller constituents. So far, we’ve looked at it in a kind of

Past simple

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 you’re

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

replacement or substitution tests… whether you can replace the sequence that you’re

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

that same sequence of words that you’re 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 you’ll see some

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

When we’ve looked at those, we’ll look at some others as well.

Now we’re 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.

We’ll 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 the ‘distinguished’ word 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 word ‘cats’, so we could say “Cats are lovely”. We can also say

“Intelligent cats are lovely”; we can say “Cats with long tails are lovely”,

or “Intelligent cats with long tails are lovely”. In all of these, of course, we’ve

got the word ‘cats’. If we omit that, we’d wind up things… wind up with things

like “intelligent with long tails are lovely” or “with 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. We’ve 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 like “the dog”.

“The dog” is singular, and you can tell because if you add a verb you get singular

agreement on the verb. So you’d say “The dog is waiting” and not “The dog are waiting”.

Of course, you would say “The 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 plural — you’d say “seven heads are better than one”. Now,

we can make a larger noun phrase; we’ve 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 like “the dog with seven heads”. Now notice what happens if you try to make

a verb agree with that. You’ll get “the dog with seven heads was waiting”, not “the

dog with seven heads were waiting”. So despite the fact that ‘heads’, 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

phrase “the dog with seven heads” is ‘dog’, 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, “La mère est morte.”

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

‘morte’ has a ‘te’ sound at the end which is the feminine agreement. On the other

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

that would be masculine, and if you wanted to say “George is dead”, you would get

“Georges est mort”, without that ‘te’ sound at the end. So again, the… in 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 have “La mère de Georges” (the mother of Georges),

and if we now see what gender we get on the adjective, we get “La mère 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 noun ‘mother’. 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 phrase “Visiting relatives can be boring”, it’s actually ambiguous,

there’s two quite distinct meanings. So on the one hand it means something like “relatives

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 word ‘can’ that it actually

doesn’t show agreement for singular or plural. So you say “the boy can” and “the 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 say “Visiting relatives is boring” or “Visiting relatives

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

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

get “Visiting relatives are boring”, on that reading where it’s the relatives who

are boring, ‘relatives’ is the head of the noun phrase “visiting relatives”.

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

But with the other meaning, where it means “to visit relatives is boring”, in that

case the noun ’visiting’ is the head of the noun phrase, and that is singular, so