Dependencies – Heads and their Dependents

Pre-reading quiz

1. Verbs may require their dependent NPs to occur in a particular gender.
   • ~True~ FALSE! Gender is a property of the NP
2. We cannot tell from the word class of a phrase whether it is a complement or an adjunct.
   • true
   • “I wrote the report (carefully)”
   • “You should tread *(carefully)”
   • carefully is an adverb in both the first and second sentence but it is only necessary in the first sentence
3. There is a strong tendency, crosslinguistically, for the head to occur in a fixed position in relation to its complements, and for this order to be the same across all phrases within a language.
   • True (head initial, head final)
4. Which of the following is the best example of a zero-marking language?
   • Chinese
   • Vietnamese
   • Very little inflectional morphology
5. English is typically thought of as a head-marking language.
   • False. Dependent marking language.

Heads of phrases

• NP: very bright sunflowers
• VP: overflowed quite quickly
• AP: very bright
• AdvP: quite quickly
• PP: inside the house

Tests:

1. Heads are obligatory and removing them changes the entire meaning of the sentence
2. Replace the phrase with just the head.
   • The head is the only word that has the same distribution as the entire phrase.
3. Heads impose restrictions on it’s dependents
   1. “See”-r must be animate and have vision

• Head bears semantic info
• Word class of the head = word class of the phrase
• Heads select dependent phrases of particular word class (complements)
  • Agree with some or all of the grammatical features of Head

Complement and Adjunct Dependents

Complement: Required. Typically closer to head.

Adjunct: Optional

Each subordinate clauses [component]

• Distinguish Concept from the actualconcrete phrase “The teacher told ary [to see them after] generally phrase only can have 1 dependent
• Mary

Verb classes

• Intransitive (Subject)
  • May have an adjunct in the VP (e.g. a PP adjunct)
• Transitive (Subject + Direct Object)
  • Take an NP complement
  • Test: Passive construction form. Inversion of the subject and object:
    • if the predicated object can become the subject in the form “is X’d [PP]”,
    • it is the direct object.
• Ditransitive
  • 2 complements within the VP: NP + NP/PP
  • sometimes it’s a direct object NP and a clausal complement to that NP.
    • sometimes that NP can be finite or infinite
    • X persuaded Y that they should leave early [finite]
    • X persuaded Y to leave early [infinite]
  • Prepositional verbs take PP complement

Verbs can appear in more than 1 subclass!

1. with finite clause “remembered that he picked up”
2. with infinitival clause “remembered to pick up”
3. with gerund-participial clause “remembered picking up”

Preposition classes

• Always transitive (beside)

Complementizer

e.g. “that”, “for”, “whether”

Head initial vs Head final

Head-marking vs Dependent-marking

Head and dependent relations: [Head: Dependent]

cross linguistically common

1. Adposition (AP) aka PP (Post/Pre) : objectNP
2. V : arguemtns of verb
3. possessed N : possessor NP
   1. Sandy ’s ring
4. N : adjective

English specifics:

1. English has head-initial clause.
2. English has head-final noun following modifying adj
3. English has 2 types of posessive:
   • cat’s tail: head-final
   • tail of the cat: head-initial
4. English has head-initial adpositional phrase

Head marking langs have extensive agreement aka cross-referencing.

• e.g. Markers on the verb (of VP) indicating both the subject and object

Dependent marking langs have case systems:

• dependents show grammatical relation. o nominative/accusative/dative etc.

zero-marking languages e.g. Chinese.

1. Neutral marking
2. Languages with no to little morphology
3. e.g. Chinese, Vietnamese
   1. Pronouns always same form