Chapter 1 - Grammatical Foundations: Words(78) a Larry left = sentence
b Theodore thinks Larry left
From a semantic point of view, these verbs take a proposition as their complement and
this obviously is expressed as a sentence. We might therefore suppose a lexical entry
such as the following:
(79) think category: [–F, –N, +V]
-grid: <experiencer, proposition>
subcat: [sentence]
There is no traditional term specifically for predicates with sentential complements,
but generative grammar has not felt the need to invent one as the subcategorisation
frame serves to distinguish between the different subcategories of verbs.
3.4.2 Nouns
The next category we will discuss is the noun, which we categorised as bearing the
features [–F, +N, –V] above. With verbs, they share the property that they have -
grids as part of their lexical entries, being [–F] categories. But they are distinguished
from verbs on the other two features and hence do not share many other properties.
From a morphological point of view, nouns are less varied than verbs, having just
two forms, singular and plural:
(80) dog dogs
pass passes
mouse mice
buffalo buffalo
cherub cherubim
Like verbs there is a fair amount of deviation from the regular morphological
representation of the plural [s]. Again, we will ignore the morphological irregularities
and treat these forms as being syntactically stem + plural:
(81) dog + s = dogs
pass + s = passes
mouse + s = mice
buffalo + s = buffalo
cherub + s = cherubim
Besides morphological irregularity, there are also a number of problematic cases.
Some nouns express concepts for which number distinctions are not normally made.
For example, sand refers to stuff that naturally comes in a quantity for which the
division into ‘one’ (singular) and ‘more than one’ (plural) is not particularly natural.
Nouns which naturally accommodate this distinction are known as count nouns and
those that do not are called mass nouns. If we wish to individuate mass nouns, we
usually do this in terms of another noun which names a unit of what the mass noun
refers to and put this into a more complicated construction, known as the partitive:
(82) a three grains of sand
b seven loaves of bread
c two cups of tea