We’ve seen that sentences have an internal structure. They consist of constituents which
themselves may consist of smaller constituents. So far, we’ve 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 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
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 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
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 noun — it replaces a whole noun phrase.
So, for example, if you take a sentence like “John saw the boy who fed the cats”. We
could replace the whole sequence “the boy who fed the cats” with the pronoun ‘him’.
So “John saw the boy who fed the cats. I saw him too.” And ‘him’ is 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 say “John saw the boy who fed the cats. I saw the girl who
fed them”, where now ‘them’ is replacing ‘the cats’. So that is also a constituent;
it’s also a noun phrase. So, should we be worried that we have one diagnostic which
says “the boy who fed the cats” is a noun phrase and another diagnostic that says “the
cats” is a noun phrase? Well, obviously not, because we’ve 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.
We’ve 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 like ‘in’, ‘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 get “in 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 say “to Tokyo”; in Japanese you’d say “Tokyo
e” or “Tokyo 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 we’ll 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 we’ll 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 like ‘there’ or ‘here’. 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
with ‘here’ or ‘there’. Other prepositions can denote things to do with time, and these
temporal phrases that result can also be replaced often with a temporal word like ‘then’.
So, we could say “She lived in Philadelphia in 2008. She lived in Philadelphia then.”
We could do both, so “She lived in Philadelphia in 2008. She lived there then.” We’ve
replaced the two prepositional phrases with these two words: ‘there’ and ‘then’.
Other prepositions denote other concepts than time or place. So, for example, there’s
a preposition ‘for’. It has many uses, but you could say “I did this for my aunt”.
There’s no single word that can replace ‘for my aunt’. We still think it’s a
prepositional phrase, but it doesn’t have a corresponding single word, like ‘there’
or ‘then’. We’ll see later on, though, that there are other diagnostics that we can
use to show that it is indeed a phrase.
We’ve seen noun phrases headed by nouns. We’ve seen prepositional phrases headed
by prepositions. Another type of phrase is an adjective phrase. An adjective could be
a word like ‘ill’ or ‘loud’, and these could be expanded to make larger phrases.
So we could say, for example, “Mary is extremely ill” or “That noise is too loud to be
tolerable”. “Extremely ill” is an adjective phrase” — “too loud to be tolerable”…
also an adjective phrase.
For some speakers, these adjective phrases can be replaced by the form ‘so’. For
such speakers, you could say “Marion seems extremely ill, and Bill is so too”, where
‘so’ picks up “extremely ill”. But not every speaker uses ‘so’ in this way.
Not every speaker accepts that. I myself find don’t find it very natural. For speakers
who do have that use of ‘so’, 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 like “Marion is ill” or “The mantlepiece is dusty”. To use
it attributively is to use it within the noun phrase, so “a very ill woman” or “a
dusty mantlepiece”.
And even speakers who can use ‘so’ to replace adjective phrases, can only do so
when those adjective phrases appear in the predicative position, so you’ll have speakers
who can say “She is very tall, and my brother is so too” but the same speakers don’t
accept, for example, “I saw a very tall man, and she saw a so woman”. So that use
of ‘so’ is restricted to adjective phrases in predicative position for the speakers who
can use it.
And the final type of phrase that we’ll consider now is a phrase headed by a verb,
a verb phrase. Verb phrases can occur in various positions. An example would be “To insult
your mother is disgraceful”. “Insult your mother” there is a verb phrase. Or “Jenny
will attend the conference”. “Attend the conference” is a verb phrase. Or “Laura
painted a portrait of the dog”. “Painted a portrait of the dog” is 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 form ‘do so’. So for example you can say
“To insult your mother is disgraceful. To do so is disgraceful.” So “insult your
mother” there we saw is a verb phrase, and indeed we can replace it with ‘do so’.
Or “Jennifer will attend the conference. I will do so too. I will attend the conference
too.” So we can see that “attend the conference” is also a verb phrase.
Or “Laura painted a portrait of the dog. Her sister did so too. Her sister painted
a portrait of the dog too.” So “painted 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 so’ is the form that can substitute for an entire verb phrase.