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Chapter Two Syntactic Categories

Lexical categories . Noun Phrase (NP)Verb Phrase (VP)Preposition Phrase (PP)Adjective Phrase (AP)Adverb Phrase (AdP). Noun Phrase (NP)NP is available in all natural languages including English, e.g. John, man, family, and father-in-law. It also includes the pronouns he, she, you, them

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Chapter Two Syntactic Categories

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    1. Chapter Two Syntactic Categories Syntactic categories are of two types: Lexical categories (N, V, P, A, AdP) and functional categories (IP, CP, DP)

    2. Lexical categories Noun Phrase (NP) Verb Phrase (VP) Preposition Phrase (PP) Adjective Phrase (AP) Adverb Phrase (AdP)

    3. Noun Phrase (NP) NP is available in all natural languages including English, e.g. John, man, family, and father-in-law. It also includes the pronouns he, she, you, them, etc. It functions as a subject or object in the sentence. The noun phrase like these is called an ‘argument’ and is assigned meaning (theta role) and case (nominative, accusative, or genitive) as will be seen later. Technically, the nouns of one word structure along with the compound nouns are equally called noun phrases.

    4. Verb Phrase (VP) Verb phrases contain a lexical verb, which is either followed by other categories or not. Examples for illustration are: They traveled. They traveled to Mecca. John rewarded Mary a nice reward yesterday. The underlined verbs in the sentences above are verb phrases. Such verb phrases can appear as stative, i.e. they are followed by a complement but with no object. Transitive verb phrases, i.e. those which accept only one object (John wrote the lesson), or ditransitive verb phrase (John gave Mary a book.)

    5. Preposition Phrase (PP) It is the phrase that comprises a preposition and a noun as its complement, e.g. I met John at school. Adjective Phrase (AP) This phrase is composed of an adjective which usually modifies a noun, e.g. John is clever. Adverb Phrase (AdP) It modifies the verb in the sentence, e.g. John came quickly.

    6. Functional categories Complementizer Phrase (CP) Inflection Phrase (IP)

    7. Complementizer Phrase (CP) This phrase is a functional category and is headed by a complementiser like; the relative pronouns. Consider: I met the teacher who taught me English at the secondary school. Who in (1), like the rest of relative pronouns, is counted as a complementizer and functions as a head of the complementizer phrase. However the wh.NPs like what, who etc locate at the specifier of the CP as will be seen later.

    8. Inflection Phrase (IP) It is of the following constituents: tense, person, number, gender, aspect, case, and mood The English IP contains tense, e.g. present, past. The stem of the verb must be inflected with one of them. Person is the next feature of the inflection (subject-verb agreement ‘s’). Number is a basic feature of the inflection phrase. However, it is along with gender not available overtly in the English IP, whereas it is available in Arabic, and other languages. Consider the following example from Arabic:

    9. 2a. Tal9ab al-bint-u Feminine-play the-girl The girl plays.   b. Yal9ab al-walad Masculine-play the-boy The boy plays.   c. Al-awlad-u yal9ab-uun The- boys play-3MP ‘The boys are playing’

    10. Case is visibly (overtly) seen in personal pronouns, e.g. he, him, his, and the ‘s’ genitive case in English, e.g. John’s book, while nominative and accusative cases appear covertly (invisibly) in English. However, the three cases appear overtly in Standard Arabic. According to the split-inflection hypothesis the IP is split into other phrases. Theses are like: Agreement subject Phrase (AgrsP) Tense Phrase (TP) Aspect Phrase (AsP) Mood Phrase (MP) Agreement object Phrase (AgroP)

    11. Heads One of the main properties of the phrases above is that every phrase has a head. the verb (V) is the head of VP. the inflection (I) is the head of IP, the noun (N) is the head of NP, the adjective (A) is the head of AP, the adverb (Ad) is the head of AdP, and the complementizer (C) is the head of CP. The head in the phrases above is responsible of projecting the other constituents of the phrase following it, e.g. the grammatical properties of the VP are determined by the verb.

    12. Consider the following examples: The boy plays tennis. *the tennis plays. The sentence in (b) above is ill-formed because the projected words precede the projector (i.e. the verb plays). The mechanism of projection is interpreted by the fist submodule of GBT called X-bar theory.

    13. X-bar theory X-bar theory (=Principles and Parameters theory) is considered as a basic module of GB. It is centrally concerned with D-structure representations and the imposition of certain constraints on them. It may also be involved at S-structure in cases of adjunction Horrocks (1987:101) maintains:  

    14. X-bar theory provides principles for the projection of phrasal categories from lexical categories and imposes conditions on the hierarchical organizations of categories in the form of general schemata Such schemata can be formulated according to Chomsky (1989: ) as in (3) below: 3) a. X’ = XX”* b. X’ = X’X”* c. X” = X”*X’

    15. The schemata in (3) can be represented diagrammatically as in (4) below: X” (spec) X’ X’ (adjunct) X complement

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