Foundations of Syntax:

Phrases
Nathaniel Torres
BBN-ANG-151
Wednesday, October 18
Review

 Remember that a sentence can be broken up into predicates and arguments.

 John kissed Mary.
 John hit the ball.
 The dog chewed on the bone.
 Each of these clauses has a subject (agent) and an object (patient).
 If we look at the last one, we can see that the internal structure of sentences
can be broken down into smaller parts.
Structure

 Let’s take a look at the last clause again:

 The dog chewed on the bone.
 Specifically, let’s look at the structure of the dog and the bone.
 If we think about it, each of these function as one whole unit.
 We can qualify this by trying to take each word on their own:
 *The chewed the bone.
 *Dog chewed the.
 *The dog chewed bone.
Structure (cont.)

 We can see that trying to isolate words creates issues of grammaticality in the
sentences.
 This would imply that the words coalesce in a kind of “grouping” which we
can call a phrase.
 Let’s take a look at the the dog and the bone.
 Each of these phrases is made up of two distinct elements: an article
(definite) and a noun.
 The question now is which one of the two is the “anchor,” or rather, the one
that creates the phrase?
Structure (cont.)

 When we think about what the main component in a phrase is, we need to
think about what carries the main information or what’s actually being talked
about.
 So, in the dog, the intuitive thing we’re talking about is the four-legged
animal.
 That makes it the main component of the phrase, everything else, modifies it
in some way.
 Dog is a noun, so, we can introduce our first phrase, i.e., the Noun Phrase.
 The article the is used to define the specificity of the dog in question, that is,
we know what dog is being talked about.
The Noun Phrase

 The noun phrase’s primary component is, of course, a noun.

 This noun is called a head.
 Heads are the primary components of any phrase. It is a head that is said to
project a phrase.
 The head’s of these phrases can then cooccur with other elements that are
said to modify them in some manner.
 Let’s look specifically at what we can modify nouns with.
The Noun Phrase (cont.)

 Now we can think about what else we can use to modify the head noun in a
Noun Phrase (NP).
 Let’s start with a simple, baby NP: the house
 We can add to this by inserting a word like big, so, the big house.
 Words like big are called adjectives.
 Is this all we can add to the NP? No, we can add more adjectives.
 The big dark spooky house
 Is that all we can add to modify house?
The NP (cont.)

 No. We can add things after the head noun. Consider:

 The big dark spooky house of scares on the hill by the river
 As we can see, we can add other elements headed by prepositions after the
noun.
 In theory we could add an infinite number of adjectives before the noun and
prepositional elements after the noun.
 This property is known as iterativity.
 Elements in the phrase that can be iterated are not considered to be
necessary in order to interpret the phrase head.
The NP (cont.)

 How about the determiner element?

 We have seen that an article can appear at the start of an NP (both the
definite the and the indefinite a).
 Can we ever remove this element from the NP?
 Yes. Consider the following:
 Cats are the most annoying lovable idiots I can think of.
 We can see that the head noun cats occurs without the need to be modified
by an article.
 This is the only instance in English where nouns can occur without a
determiner.
Determiners in the NP

 Are the articles the only determiners that can appear in the NP?
 Intuitively, no. There are a number of determiners that can occur in the NP.
 For example, there are demonstratives or even pronouns that can appear as
determiners, for example:
 That big dark spooky house on the hill.
 We students can’t ever seem to catch a break.
 Are determiners iterative? No. Only one can appear in a noun phrase.
 *That the big dark spooky house on the hill.
Is the Order of modifiers fixed and are
there variations?
 In English we can see one side of the story.
 Cross-linguistically, there are number of different options and variations with
respect to how an NP can be built up.
 With respect to order, for example, English likes to place adjectives only
before the noun it modifies; so: the big blue house but not *the house big
blue.
 There are, however languages which swap the order modifier placements as
well as do different things with respect to post-nominal elements and
determiners.
 Let’s take a look at some cross-linguistic data.
Adjectives: Not Only Pre-Nominal

 Many Indo-European languages, like English, like to place the adjectives that modify
nouns before the noun that they modify.
 This is not, however, the only place that they may appear.
 Within the Indo-European language family, the Romance languages most famously place
modifying adjectives after the nouns that they modify.
 Consider the following examples:
 Les plus belles filles brunes et françaises
the most beautiful girls brown-haired and French
‘the most beautiful brown-haired French girls’
 Los grandes carros azules y viejos
the big cars blue and old
‘the big old blue cars’
Other orders (cont.)

 We can see for both French and Spanish that there are instances where an
adjective can come before the noun.
 For both languages, these are typically evaluative adjectives, usually
commenting on beauty, age, size, and a few other qualities.
 Other adjectives typically follow the noun as we have seen.
 We can also see that both languages (and other Romance languages) make use
of the definite article as well and, like English, it comes at the start of the
phrase.
 This is, however, not the only possible position of the determiner.
 There are a number of IE languages which make regular use of the article
after the noun.
Post-Nominal Determiners

 Consider the following examples from Romanian and Bulgarian:

 Fat-a frumoasă, deșteaptă și înaltă
girl-THE beautiful smart and tall
‘the tall, smart and beautiful girl’
 Golyama-ta sinja kola
big-THE blue car
‘the big blue car’
 We can see that in both languages that the article comes as a suffix either on
the noun (as in Romanian) or on the adjective itself (Bulgarian).
Double Determination

 There exist language which allow for different strategies regarding the
presence of multiple determiners.
 Recall that we said that in English it was ungrammatical to use more than one
determiner in the NP:
 *That the beautiful red-headed girl.
 However, this property is not universal as there are languages which allow for
so-called double determination.
 This typically means that a language will make use of both a demonstrative
and a definite article in certain constructions.
Double Determination (cont.)

 Consider the following examples from both Hungarian and Swedish:

 A szép vörös hajú lány
the beautiful redhaired girl
‘the beautiful redheaded girl’
 Az a szép vörös hajú lány
that the beautiful redhaired girl
‘that beautiful redheaded girl’
 Den vackra rödhåriga flicka-n
that beautiful redheaded girl-THE
‘The beautiful redheaded girl’
 Den där vackra rödhåriga flicka-n
that there beautiful redheaded girl-THE
‘that beautiful redheaded girl’
Double Determination (cont.)

 We can see a number of different things going on.

 Hungarian looks like English in the first example with respect to the order of
adjectives as well as the article coming at the very front of the clause.
 It deviates from English in that use of the demonstrative requires the
cooccurrence of the definite article resulting in the construction az a, which
English does not have.
 Swedish, although related to English, deviates even further from it for two
reasons:
 It has double determination similar to what we can see in the Hungarian
construction az a, and;
 It also has suffixed articles.
Double Determination (cont.)

 We can see with the Swedish data that the demonstrative changes form as
well in order to express the difference between the demonstrative that is
required when a noun is modified by adjectives, and when the meaning this
or that is implied.
 If the latter meanings are implied then Swedish uses the place adverbs här
and där ‘here’ and ‘there,’ respectively.
 There is a similar usage in dialects of the American South which also employ
this method of demonstratives:
 This here redheaded girl is the sweetest thing you ever did see.
 That there apple pie is about as sweet as a peach in the middle of summer.
 Notice though that using the definite article, even in these constructions, is
still completely ungrammatical.
Prepositions in the Noun Phrase

 For the languages that we have looked at so far, we can see that they are
variable in the position of adjectives and in the treatment of determiners.
 One thing is, however, fairly consistent in the languages that we have
discussed so far: they tend to go after the noun in question.
 Une belle fille brune aux yeux bleus
a beautiful girl brown-haired at the eyes blue
‘a beautiful brown-haired girl with blue eyes’
 o femeie frumoasă din România
a woman beautiful from Romania
‘a beautiful woman from Romania’
Prepositions in the NP (cont.)

 The Romance languages mirror the English in that when prepositions appear
within the NP, they occur after the noun.
 So too in Swedish:
 En vacker flicka i klassen med brillor på huvudet
a beautiful girl in class-the with glasses on head-the
‘a beautiful girl in the class with glasses on her head’
 We see no difference here either. Things get more interesting when we look
at other languages.
Prepositions in the NP (cont.)

 If we take a look at Hungarian, there are constructions that provide us with a more diverse set of data:
 A Péterrel való találkozás
the Peter.with VALÓ meeting
‘the meeting with Peter’
 Az érdekes mondattani témáról való/történő beszélgetés
the interesting syntactic topic.about VALÓ/TÖRTÉNŐ discussion
‘the discussion about the interesting syntactic topic’
 We can see in these cases Hungarian has constructions in which the prepositional phrases in the NP occur to
left of the noun, and not the right.
 This is very common in many languages cross-linguistically, especially those that build their clauses to the
left, not the right (e.g., Turkic languages).
 Hungarian tends to build its sentences to the right, like English, but certain constructions, like the ones
above, are built to the left.
 Note: the use of való and történő in these constructions is required to link the nouns in the prepositional
phrase to the head noun of the NP. They do not contribute a meaning in these constructions.