Chapter 1 - Grammatical Foundations: Wordsinflections, we categorise aspectuals as [–N, +V] elements, but simply leave the [±F]
feature undefined. In common with inflections, aspectual auxiliaries also take only
verbal complements and they never precede any other category. However, they may
precede either verbs or other aspectual auxiliaries:
(188) a he has [eaten the sandwich]
b he has [been eating the sandwich]
Given that verbs are categorised as [–F, –N, +V], we cannot claim that this is the
category that aspectual auxiliaries subcategorise for as this would exclude them from
taking non-thematic verbal complements (i.e. other aspectual auxiliaries). On the other
hand, if we claim that they select complements of the category [–N, +V] they would
only be able to select for auxiliary complements and not main verbs. The solution to
the problem is stating that the category they select as their complement is optionally
specified for the [–F] feature, which correctly predicts that they cannot have an
inflectional complement.
Thus aspectual auxiliaries might have lexical entries such as the following:
(189) have category: [–N, +V]
subcat: [(–F), –N, +V]
be category: [–N, +V]
(prog) subcat: [(–F), –N, +V]
be category: [–N, +V]
(pass) subcat: [(–F), –N, +V]
If there is a non-functional non-thematic verb, then it is predicted that there must
be non-functional non-thematic nouns, adjectives and prepositions. To what extent is
this prediction fulfilled? There are nouns which do not appear to behave like thematic
nouns and yet are clearly not categorised as determiners either. Consider the following
examples:
(190) a a bottle of wine
b a cup of tea
c a group of tourists
The italicised items in these examples appear to be nouns and yet they do not behave
like other nouns. If we compare these examples to the following we can see some
obvious differences:
(191) a a picture of the president
b the disposal of the evidence
c the door of the house
The nouns in (190) do not function as the main semantic element of the expression as
do those in (191). Note that the expressions in (191) refer to a picture, a disposal and a
door respectively, but the referents of the expressions in (190) are wine, tea and
tourists respectively. One can pour a bottle of wine and drink a cup of tea, but what is
poured and drunk is not the bottle or the cup but the wine and the tea. On the other
hand, if one breaks a picture of the president or deplores the disposal of the evidence,
it is not the president that gets broken nor the evidence that is deplored. The kind of