Professional Documents
Culture Documents
• Syntactic Category
• Grammatical Relations
• Thematic Role
Subject
{NP/S’} daughter of S
Object
NP daughter of VP
Adjunct
Other modifier (of VP)
Subject
Consider the following pair of examples :
a. [The cat] devoured [the rat]
b. [The rat] devoured [the cat]
These two sentence have exactly the ame word and have the same predicator
devoured. Yet they are significantly different in meaning and the main difference
comes from what serves as subject or object.
In (a), the subject is the cat, whereas in (b)it is the rat
the object is the rat in (a) but the cat in (b).
The subject of a sentence is not always an Agent, or even the ‘topic’ of the sentence.
It was raining hard
There was a duck in the garden
My brother wears a green overcoat.
Note :
Agent is the role of an argument that by its action affects some other entity. Tom broke
the window
Subjects cont’d.
1. Agreement
The verb usually agrees with the subject
a. The girl likes/*the boys
b. Our neighbor takes/*his children to school in his car
2. Case
If replaced with a pronoun, the subject usually has nominative case.
a. The boys like the girls.
They like the girls.
3. Inversion
The subject inverts with an auxiliary in questions.
a. It has been hot all summer
b. Has it been hot all summer ?
4. Tag Questions
a. The subject is questioned in a tag question.
b. It can get hot, can’t it ?
c. Sanam finished, didn’t she ?
Object
Object also can’tbe identified semantically.
a. Thunder frightens the dog.
b. The dog fears thunder.
The objects in (a) and (b) are not really affected by the action. In (a) the dog is
experiencing something, and in (b) the thunder is somehow causing some feeling in the
dog.
•
Adjuncts
Adjuncts are always optional. They specify manner, location, time, or reason
(how, where, when, or why)
a. We ate quickly
b. We ate in the kitchen
c. We ate at noon
d. We ate because whe had to
At the moment, we have no way of identifying adjuncts structurally.
Structural Relations
Structural relations : the formal relationship between items of a tree.
Ex : M, N, O, D, E, F, H, I, J
The relation between a category and its constituents : A category dominates all of
its constituents.
Immadiate dominance
Ex : A dominates B, C, D, E, F, G,
• Constituent
Each node is a constituent.
{E, H} are NOT a constituent.
• Constituent of
A dominates B, then we say B is a constituent of A.