Advanced Concepts
in English Syntax
Determiner Phrases
• Not every language has structures that
correspond to this category
• The concept of Determiners heading phrases
simply helps explain some English syntactic
constructions that would be difficult to
understand otherwise
• The difference between NPs and DPs is
essential for using English articles properly
Determiner Phrases
• Consider: The gnarly tree
Determiner Phrases
Determiner Phrases
• Determined NPs seem to have different
distributional properties than simple NPs
• Syntactic Heads project syntactic properties
onto their phrasal categories
• Thus, Determiners appear to Head their
respective phrases
Determiner Phrases
• Determined NPs anchor discourse world
referents in pragmatic space
– Verbal inflection does the same thing
• So is “coffee table” an undertmined NP?
• Science is only settled until it isn’t
GP Hypothesis
• Genitive Noun Phrase Hypothesis
• Genitive Phrases or GPs function as
Determiners
Inflectional Phrase
• The IP Hypothesis proposes that an inflected
verb phrase is headed by an external
inflectional AUX, even when that AUX is not
expressed
• As English has evolved into a more Analytic
Language, the Syntactic Head of VPs has
moved away from the Verb
• In other words, just as NPs often/usually end
up as DPs, so VPs usually end up as Ips
– In theory
IPs
• Possible Structures
IPs
• AUX can move to the front of an S by itself,
suggesting it is an independent constituent on
some level
• This eliminates some of the previous proposed
structures
IPs
• “is reading an Igbo Dictionary” cannot move
as a clump or constituent
IPs
• Why make AUX the Head?
• Each AUX requires a specific inflected form of
the verb
• Projecting syntactic properties onto other
parts of the phrase is the job of the Head
IPs
• The AUX also takes the major inflectional
information of the clause
– Tense and agreement
• Leaving is obviously the Semantic Head
– Yet the AUX takes the inflectional information
IPs without an AUX
• Under this theory, not all constituents that act
as IPs have an AUX expressed
– In these phrases, the AUX is part of the verb
– When there is no expressed AUX, the inflectional
category that heads the phrase migrates to the
verb
Proving IPs
• This “empty category” hypothesis does have
evidence
• Inversion questions
• The “invisible” AUX appears in every inverted
question in Modern English
– Arachaic constructions indicate our shift toward
Analytic Morphology
•
Proving IPs
• Negation also supports the IP hypothesis in
English
Proving IPs
• Auxiliary Stacking supports the IP hypothesis
too
– English clauses can have up to four AUX
Proving IPs
• In Stacked Auxiliaries, each AUX governs the
element to the right
• Thus, the first AUX is the Head of the IP
– All subsequent AUXs are part of the VP
Linguistic Theory
• The book says these theories “should provide
a general idea of how the formalisms of early
twenty-first-century linguistic theory [works]…
in the tradition of Generative Grammar”
• Science is always evolving
• I was trained on 20th century linguistic theory
• Our goal is just to describe English grammar
– These theories provide one way of helping us do
that