Keywords - L322.3a F97

Intermediate Syntax

Week 3: Lexical Insertion, Tense, Case Theory, and Raising

• Lexical insertion
  • Lexical items are selected from the lexicon that appropriate match each predicate and operator:

(1)

(2)

(3)

D-structure

• (3) is called a deep-structure or more commonly today a D-Structure.
• '-ed' is a bound form called an affix.
• Affixes require a host.
• A host is a word-stem that the affix is adjoined to.

The first principle is morphological in nature:

(4)     Bound Forms

• A bound form ([-Free] affix) requires a host or the structure will crash.
• The affix must find a host.
• 1.   Raise the verb
• 2.   Lower the affix.
• Which one?
• Answer can be found in constructions containing a transitive verb and a preverbal adverb:

(5)     Liberace slowly played the piano.

(6)

• If play is raised to T, the adverb comes out in the wrong place
• Let us first place Liberace at the beginning of the sentence in the subject position. We will formally account for this below:

(7)     *Liberace played slowly the piano.

• If 'ed'  is lowered to the verb, the adverb comes out in the correct place:

(8)     Liberace slowly played the piano.

The follow structure is now generated:

(9)

Raising to Subject

• The structure in (9) still represents an unacceptable sentence:

(10)     *slowly played the piano Liberace.

• Let's go back to the simpler form to resolve it:

(11)     *played John.

• In 222 you learned the subject is to the right of the verb and is. dominated by S.
• Let's raise John up and adjoin it to T.

(12)

• TP here corresponds to S learned in 222.
• In the two level hypothesis, the subject is adjoined to TP.

(13)

• In the three-level (X-bar) hypothesis the lower TP in (13) corresponds to T-bar:

(14)

• This raising is motivated by two principles.
• We will discuss the first one now, the other later.
• The first is what Chomsky calls:
• The Extended Projection Principle

(15)     All sentences require a subject.

• In (9).or (11) there are two forms that could move to the subject position.
• The subject cannot be a V, it can only be a NP.
• Hence, NP John raises to the subject position.
•  

Irregular verbs

• three types
  • -d/-t
    • frequently a change of stem vowel
    • past form is same as PPP (non-progressive form)
    • above ending never spelled as '-ed'; only /d/ or /t/
      • tell, told; sell, sold; make, made; do, did; say, said.
      • lend, lent; send, sent; dream, dreamt; feel, felt; leave, left.
  • strong verbs (so-called by Germanicists)
    • Always change of vowel in past tense
    • no past tense affix
    • some have a PPP affix (some allophone of '-en').
    • sink, sank, sunk; swim, swam, swum; drink, drank, drunk; write, wrote, written.
• Irregular endings determined by verb stem
• [+Past] cannot be spelled out as '-ed' before adjoined to host
• The irregular changes in the verb stem cannot
• General property of all affixes: [+Weak]
• [+Weak] lower; [-Weak] cannot lower.
• Once lowered, the affix that is selected must match the affix given in the lexical entry.
• If an unmatched affix is selected, structure crashes.
• English dialects vary on distribution of regular and irregular verbs.
• If the verb selects no affix (the strong verbs), merge is the result.
• The lexical item is assigned to the node that dominates V and T.
• drank,. for example, contains DRINK and [+Past].
  

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