[Corpora-List] Subcat Questions

[Christopher Bader]

I would go farther than Mike and say that subcategorization frames are pretty much gone from contemporary syntactic analysis.  They have been been replaced by head-complement relations, in many cases involving functional heads, like "little v", which plays a role in the "double object" construction.  For a good explanation, and indeed an excellent introduction to contempory syntax, see Andrew Radford's Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English.

Christopher Bader
Unveil Technologies
www.unveil.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Maxwell [mailto:maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu]
Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2003 9:38 AM
To: corpora at uib.no
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Subcat Questions


Ute Römer wrote:
> ... I explained verbal
> subcategorisation frames to my intro to linguistics students this
> morning as the combination of complements (obligatory constituents) a
> verb (as head of a VP) takes.

One of the differences between this idea of subcat and that in the
earlier msg today, concerns whether subjects are subcategorized
(previous msg) or not (above-quoted msg).  This is a theoretical issue.
Since all finite verbs in English require subjects, and since there is
evidence that the subject is outside the VP, while all the complements
are inside the VP, some linguists hold that subjects are not
subcategorised.  There are lots of arguments pro and con, which I won't
go into here.

There are also questions about whether other categories besides verbs
have subcategorization frames (prepositions, for instance, and at least
some adjectives).

     Mike Maxwell
     Linguistic Data Consortium
     maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu