Basic English Grammar with Exercises

Check questions

Chapter

Check questions

Q1 Rewrite rules establish the nature of structures in languages. They become

maximally general via the use of category variables which may stand both for thematic

and functional categories. The complement rule (X' Æ X YP) introduces the head and

the complement; the order of the elements on the right side of the arrow may be

swapped, thereby it is possible to achieve cross-linguistic generalisations about the

relative order of head + complement. The specifier rule (XP Æ YP X') introduces the

structural position associated with specifiers which, in English, appear to the left of the

constituent containing the head + complement (X'). The adjunct rule differs from the

other two in that what is on the left hand side of the arrow may be a head or a bar-level

constituent or a maximal projection. In addition, the adjunct may also be of two types:

a zero-level category or a maximal projection. Finally, the adjunct rule is recursive, i.e.

a constituent appearing on the left hand side of the arrow also appears on the right

hand side, thus inclusion of any number of adjuncts in a structure is made possible.

Q2 (i) head to head: compound nouns

X Æ X Y (armchair)

X Æ Y X

(ii) phrase to bar-level constituent: pronominal APs

X' Æ X' YP

X' Æ YP X' (popular smart student)

(iii) phrase to phrase: relative clauses

XP Æ XP YP

XP Æ YP XP

It must be noted that the order of the constituents on the right side of the arrow may

vary, i.e. adjunction to either side is possible and that in case of adjunction to a head

the adjoining element is itself a head, whereas in the other two cases it is a maximal

projection.

Q3 The constituent that is not projected in a phrase is called the head (the zero-

level projection). A head projects its properties (e.g. its category), thus the maximal

projection containing that head will share the category of the head and so will

intermediate projections between the two. Projection is sharing category among the

three levels of constituents. The properties of a given head which is inserted into a

head position are idiosyncratic, in other words, if a word is picked from the lexicon, all

the relevant pieces of information about it specified in the lexicon are also

automatically available. Thus, depending on what category a given word has, the

phrase it heads will acquire the same category.