Chapter 1 - Grammatical Foundations: Words(49) I asked [if Mary may marry Martin]
In the bracketed sentence here, the complementiser is if and we can see that the
difference between this and the previous case is that here the sentence is interpreted as
a question, not a statement as previously. The sentence beginning with that is
declarative and the one beginning with if is interrogative. Given that the only
difference between the two is the complementiser, it seems reasonable to assume that
this is what the complementiser contributes to the meaning of the sentence. The
distinction between declarative and interrogative is known as the force of the sentence
and hence complementisers contribute to this aspect of sentence meaning.
Functional categories, such as modal auxiliaries and complementisers are specified
for the [+F] and a distinguishing property of these categories is that they are not
involved with the assignment of -roles. They therefore lack -grids in their lexical
entries.
Having established this major division we will now proceed to investigate the
individual categories.
3.4 The Thematic categories
Let us focus our attention first on the thematic ([–F]) categories, returning to the
functional ([+F]) categories towards the end of the chapter. Much of our discussion so
far has concerned verbs. This perhaps reflects their centrality in many sentences, being
typical predicates. It also seems that notions such as predicate and argument are more
obviously expressed in relation to verbs. So it is right to start our discussion of
categories with them.
3.4.1 Verbs
Verbs, as discussed above, are categorised as [–F, –N, +V] elements. In this section we
will introduce a number of properties peculiar to this category.
We have already seen that verbs take morphemes which express tense:
(50) smiled/smiles
reached/reaches
required/requires
etc.
The different forms of a word are known as its inflections and we say that verbs
inflect for tense in that different forms represent tense distinctions. As discussed
earlier, not all inflectional forms are regular and, especially in the past tense, we have
irregular forms:
(51) sink – sank
think – thought
hit – hit
etc.
We are not so much concerned with morphological or phonetic form in this book, so
we can think of these past tense verbs as abstractly being a stem, i.e. the lexical verb,
plus a past tense morpheme which we will represent as -ed though obviously this is not
supposed to indicate a pronunciation: