let’s distinguish along the line of plurality. English nouns can be either singular or plural. The distinction between singular and plural is usually morphologically marked with one of the plural endings like -s or -es (although it need not be, as in mice or deer). Most singular nouns in English require a D;10 plural ones do not require a D, although they allow one:
18)
1 *Cat ate the spider.
2 The cat ate the spider.
3 Cats ate the spider.
4 The cats ate the spider.
We mark this distinction with the feature [±PLURAL].
Closely related to the plural/singular distinction is the count vs. mass noun distinction. Count nouns represent individual, “countable” elements. For example, apple is a count noun. “Mass nouns” usually can’t be counted in the same way. For example sincerity and air are mass nouns. There are two easy distributional tests to distinguish between mass and count nouns. Mass nouns take the quantifier much, while count nouns take many.
19)
1 many apples
2 *much apples/apple11
3 *many sincerity
4 *many air
5 much sincerity
6 much air
Like plurals, mass nouns generally don’t require a determiner, but count nouns do:
20)
1 *I ate apple.
2 I ate the apple.
3 I ate sugar.
4 I ate the sugar.
5 She is filled with sincerity.
6 I doubt her sincerity.
We distinguish between count and mass nouns using the feature [±COUNT].
Next, let us distinguish between proper names and common nouns. Proper names are nouns like Andrew Carnie. Common nouns are all other nouns. For the most part, proper names resist taking determiners:
21) a) Andrew Carnie
b) *the Andrew Carnie
There are some exceptions to this generalization. For example, when referring to a family it’s common to say the Smiths. In other languages, proper names can take determiners. For example, in some dialects of Spanish, it is okay to say La Rosamaria “the Rosemary”. If necessary, we can distinguish proper names from common nouns using the feature [±PROPER], although this feature is less useful than the others.
Finally let’s look at the subcategories of pronouns and anaphors. These classes differ from the others in that they are closed. They never allow determiners or adjectival modification.
| 22) a) | he | b) | himself |
| c) | *the he | d) | *the himself |
| e) | *big he | f) | *big himself |
Pronouns belong to the class [+PRONOUN, –ANAPHOR]. Anaphors are [+PRONOUN,
+ANAPHOR]. All other nouns are [–PRONOUN, –ANAPHOR].
You now have enough information to do WBE 11-13 and GPS 11.
The Special Case of Possessive Pronouns
Possessive pronouns are an especially tricky case. They clearly function semantically like nouns. So for example, Susan’s father might be the same person as her father, where her refers to Susan. In chapter 5, you’ll see cases where possessive pronouns behave like pronouns with respect to a phenomenon called binding. But in other regards, possessive pronouns actually behave more like determiners: they are in complementary distribution with determiners (*the her book). They appear at the beginning of the noun phrase. This gives possessive pronouns the flavor of a determiner. So are possessive pronouns a subcategory of noun or a subcategory of determiners? That’s a really tricky question. Once you learn about head movement in chapter 10, you might consider an analysis where they start out as nouns and become determiners via the mechanism of head movement. But for the first part of this book, it’s probably easier just to treat them as determiners, because they normally appear in the same syntactic positions as determiners.
4.2 Subcategories of Verbs
There are really two major ways in which we can divide up verbs into subcategories. One is along the lines of tense/finiteness (i.e., whether the verb is left, leaves, (will) leave or (to) leave). We’re going to leave these distinctions aside until chapter 9, although I hope it is obvious by now how we’d use features to distinguish among them, even if the precise features we’d use aren’t defined yet. The other way to divvy up verbs is in terms of the number of noun phrases (NPs) and prepositional phrases (PPs) or clauses (CPs) they require. This second kind of division is known as argument structure.
In order to discuss argument structure, we first need to define some basic terms. If you took grammar in school, you probably learned that “every sentence has a subject and a predicate.” Under your schoolroom definitions, the subject is usually the first noun phrase (that is, the first noun and all things that go along with it), and the predicate is everything else in the sentence. So for example, in (23) the subject is the dastardly phonologist, and the predicate would be stole the syntactician’s lunch.
23) [The dastardly phonologist][stole the syntactician’s lunch].
subject predicate (traditional definitions)
The definition of subject isn’t too bad (we’ll refine it later though), but syntacticians use the term “predicate” entirely differently. The syntactician’s definition of predicate is based on the mathematical notion of a “relation”. The predicate defines the relation between the individuals being talked about and the real world – as well as among themselves. The entities (which can be abstract) participating in the relation are called arguments. To see how this works, look at the following example:
24) Gwen hit the baseball.
There are two arguments in this example, Gwen and the baseball. These are elements in the world that are participants in the action described by the sentence. The predicate here is hit. Hit expresses a relation between the two arguments: more precisely, it indicates that the first argument (Gwen) is applying some force on the second argument (the baseball). This may
