<span style="font-weight: bold;">
English rules for NP/QP</span><br><br><br>Dear list participants,<br>
<br>
A week or so ago, I asked for some pointers to English PS-rules that
are detailed enough to correctly predict the order and cooccurrence
restrictions for pre-head material in the English NP/QP. This is for
use in an undergraduate syntax class. (I made the "mistake" of giving
my class real sentences from the web and soon discovered that our toy
grammar was hopelessly inadequate for phrases like <span style="font-style: italic;">All the United Nations climate panel's final recommendations on climate change</span>!)<br><br>Thanks
for all the responses and pointers to literature. It is clear that
the structure of the pre-head material in English NP/QP is very complex.<br><br>
1. References<br>
<br>The most comprehensive discussions that I found were in Jackendoff
(1977) and in Huddleston and Pullum (2002) (where the chapter on NPs is
by John Payne and Rodney Huddleston). I was also referred C.L. Baker's
syntax text and to the Pargram project English grammar. (For various
boring reasons, I couldn't access these.) Also helpful was a paper by
Robert Berwick and Sam Pilato (1987) "Learning syntax by automata
induction" <span style="font-style: italic;">Machine learning 2:9-38. </span>I also found useful a chart in the following:<br>
<br>
@book{Dekeyser79,<br>
Address = {Antwerpen/Amsterdam},<br>
Author = {Dekeyser, Xavier and Devriendt, Betty and Tops, Guy A. J.<br>
and Geukens, Steven},<br>
Booktitle = {Foundations of English grammar},<br>
Publisher = {De Nederlandsche Boekhandel},<br>
Title = {Foundations of English grammar},<br>
Year = {1979}}<br>
<br>
which was kindly forwarded to me by Koenraad de Smedt.<br>
<br>
<br>
2. PS-rules<br>
<br>It is not terribly difficult to write PS-rules that will get all
the possible elements in the right order. The following set of rules
will do a reasonably accurate job. (I've omitted parentheses, on the
assumption that all the elements are optional).<br><br><br>QP ---> Q NP<br>NP ---> {Det, NP[CASE GEN]} Num N' <br>N' ---> AdjP* N' PP-adj CP-rel<br>N' ---> N-mod NP-descrip N PP-obl CP-comp
<br><br>Q would be a POS label for words like <span style="font-style: italic;">all, half, </span>or <span style="font-style: italic;">both</span>,
which precede the genitive or determiner. (Payne and Huddleston call
these predeterminers; Jackendoff calls them N''' specifiers)<br>Num would be a POS label for words like <span style="font-style: italic;">few, many, two</span>, which follow the genitive or determiner. <br>AdjP includes ordinary adjectives, and possibly also participles which have been converted to Adj by lexical rule (
e.g. <span style="font-style: italic;">a boring lecture</span>)<br>PP-adj is for adjunct PPs; CP-rel is for relative clauses<br>N-mod is for the pre-head N in phrases like <span style="font-style: italic;">box cutter </span>
or <span style="font-style: italic;">college president. </span>(On some analyses, these might be done in the lexicon.)<br>NP-descrip is for the 'descriptive genitive' in phrases like <span style="font-style: italic;">
women's college</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">men's room</span>. (Ditto a possible lexical analysis.)<br>PP-obl is for PPs that seem to act like arguments of the head N, e.g. <span style="font-style: italic;">
description of John</span>.<br>CP-comp is for CPs that are arguments of the head N, e.g. <span style="font-style: italic;">claim that the earth is flat</span><br><br>Flatter
analyses would certainly be possible. There is also disagreement in
the literature about the proper place on the right periphery to attach
the adjunct elements PP-adj and CP-rel.<br><br>The challenging thing is
to account for which of the prehead modifiers can cooccur; to say when
the head of NP can be omitted; and to account for when the partitive <span style="font-style: italic;">of</span> appears. It is not easy to write lexical entries that make the correct predictions.<br><br>
The most promising line of analysis to me seems to be a 'fused head
analysis', where Q, Det, NP[CASE GEN] and Num elements have an
alternate analysis where they also express the head N of the phrase.
(This is the view promoted by Payne and Huddleston.) So in <span style="font-style: italic;">all of the books</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">all </span>is
a fused Q+N. This seems to be a better analysis than one with an empty
N head or with movement, since it accounts for the absence of any of of
elements that might normally intervene between Q and N. (*<span style="font-style: italic;">all John's/those/small of the books</span>; *<span style="font-style: italic;">I saw John's red</span>).<br><br>The
best way within LFG to accomplish this sort of analysis would seem to
be the lexical sharing approach of Wescoat (2002). In Wescoat's
dissertation, he explores this treatment of 'pronominal determiners' (<span style="font-style: italic;">that, these</span>,
etc). Although he doesn't give an analysis of the other fused head
constructions in NP, it seems like his approach would extend naturally
to them.<br><br>Pursuing the lexical sharing analysis, we would have lexical entries for some of the prehead material like the following:<br><br>those <-- Det | Det N<br>all <-- Q | Q N<br>
few <-- Num | Num N<br><br>
There also appear to be some quantifiers that exclude the presence of a Det/NP[Case Gen], such as <span style="font-style: italic;">each, every, some</span> (So <span style="font-style: italic;">*each John's book/*John's each book
</span>). Jackendoff (1977) treats this group as in the POS category Art (along with determiners like <span style="font-style: italic;">the, that, those</span>). These Det quantifiers can also appear with no following N and with a partitive (
<span style="font-style: italic;">each of the books</span>). A lexical sharing analysis also seems possible for these:<br>
<br>
each <-- Det | Det N<br>
<br>
<br>We would also need a general lexical rule that allows a genitive NP
to instantiate both the specifier and head positions of the NP.
However, a genitive without a head seems to exclude partitive or other
subcategorized complements (<span style="font-style: italic;">I saw many/all/two of the books vs. *I saw Mary's of the books</span>; <span style="font-style: italic;">I read Joan's claim that passive is a lexical rule/*I read Joan's that passive is a lexical rule.
</span>)<br><br>So perhaps the lexical rule for sharing with genitives is<br><br>NP [Case Gen] <-- NP | NP N'<br><br>By fusing the genitive with N' rather than N, we would predict no possible complements for the N.
<br>
<br>
Finally, it appears that all of the elements that nearly all of the
pre-head elements that are lexically shared with N have optional
partitive complements. (<span style="font-style: italic;">Those of the books/all of the books/each of the books/many of the books.</span>) Many partitive complements seem to be subject to a definiteness restriction (*<span style="font-style: italic;">
all of books</span>) that forces a definite article or a possessor to occur. <br>
<br>
I have not treated here the construction that Jackendoff calls <span style="font-style: italic;">pseudo-partitive</span>
(e.g., a bunch/group of men). The partitive in these constructions is
not subject to the definiteness restriction, so it either has a
different syntactic structure or (more likely) these nouns impose
different selectional restrictions on their complements.<br><br><br>3. Conclusion and thanks<br>
<br>
There are clearly many remaining issues here! It was interesting to me
in reviewing the literature to see how difficult it is to manage an
analysis of the pre-head material that does not involve lexical
sharing. Though my goal here was primarily to find PS-rules good
enough to work for English NPs, I found myself convinced that a lexical
sharing/fused head is the best proposal out there for this. <br>
<br>
Thanks to those who wrote with comments and suggestions: Mary
Dalrymple, Joan Bresnan, Stephen Wechsler, Koenraad de Smedt, Alice
Gaby, Andrew Spencer, and Robert Berwick.<br>