In the previous lecture we looked at the structure of sentences, and we talked about them in
terms of the X-bar schema. The idea of the X-bar schema is that the phrases projected
by different types of heads nevertheless have structure in common; they have the same kind
of structure. What we're going to look at in this lecture is the structure of some phrases
that are headed by non-verbal heads. So, the structure of phrases headed by prepositions,
by adjectives, but above all, by nouns.
There are some clear similarities between sentences and noun phrases. So, if you take
a, like, a sentence like "The company distributed the record" and you also have a noun phrase
"The company's distribution of the record."
So in both cases, you have what looks like two arguments. So, in the case of "the company
distributed the record", you have the agent argument "the company", and you have the theme
argument "the record". And the agent is expressed as the subject of the sentence (it occurs
to the left of the verb), and the theme is "the record", and that appears to the right
of the verb.
And it looks as though we're seeing the same thing in the nominal. So, the noun phrase
which is headed by the nominalization "distribution", we see again that we have a noun phrase that
seems to correspond to the agent of distributing, so we have "the company's distribution", and
then we have another argument that corresponds to the thing that gets distributed, "the record",
although in this case, it's enclosed in a PP, so we have "The company's distribution
of the record."
Given this parallel, it looks as though we could make the attractive assumption that
the structure of the noun phrase and the structure of the verb phrase are very similar. The,
in both cases, we have a position to the left, the specifier position we've argued for the
verb phrase, and the position to the right of the head, the complement position. And,
it looks as though we could say the same thing for the nominal and that in both cases, the
agent is getting expressed in the specifier position, and the theme is getting expressed
in the complement position. So, given this, we have a structure for the NP where we have
a complement, which is a PP, and a specifier which is another NP, which expresses the agent,
whereas the complement expresses the theme. So that looks very parallel to the kind of
structure that we composed for VPs.
So this parallel between the structure of sentences and the structure of nominals can
be taken a step further. In an active sentence, it's typical that the agent is expressed as
the subject, it appears in the specifier position of the VP and then in the IP, while the theme
is expressed as the complement of the verb. So, alongside, so we have the active sentence
"the company distributed the record". But there are, uhm, there are processes which
can alter that alignment of thematic roles and grammatical positions. And a very prominent
one is passivization.
So alongside that active sentence, you can also find the passive sentence where we get
"the record was distributed by the company." In the same way, in the nominalization, we
have "The company's distribution of the record." and we also have what looks like the passive
version, even though there's no morphology in this case on the noun. So we get "The record's
distribution by the company."
So there again, we see something that looks very similar between sentences on the one
hand, and noun phrases on the other.
And finally, we can attach modifiers inside nominals in just the same way that we attach
modifiers inside verb phrases. And, as we would expect, they occur outside the arguments,
that is further away from the head. So in a sentence, we can get "The Normans invaded
England." and we can add the modifier "in 1066" to give "the Normans invaded England
in 1066". And in parallel way in the nominalization we can have "The Normans' invasion of England",
and we're going to add a modifier that again occurs outside the complement "The Normans'
invasion of England in 1066." Another adjunct might be something like if we have "the company
exploited the children to make more profit" and we have the nominalization "the company's
exploitation of the children to make more profit." So again, a close parallel between
the structure we see in the sentence, and the structure that we see in the nominal.
# Break At the same time, there are some differences
between the structure of sentences and the structure of nominals, and some of those we'll
be able to explain at this point, and some of those we'll only be able to explain later.
So an obvious difference is in exactly how those two arguments that we've seen... so
we've seen the subject argument, the specifier, and we've seen a complement... how these get
realized in the case of the sentence as opposed to the nominal. So in a sentence like "Mary
collected the mushrooms" we have two noun phrases: Mary and the mushrooms. In the corresponding
nominalization, we get "Mary's collection of the mushrooms". So there's two differences
there: one is that the subject argument in the case of the nominalization has this cliticized
"'s" attached to it, the possessive marker. So you get "Mary's collection" not just...
as opposed to "Mary collected". And the other difference is that the complement in the case
of the verb phrase is another noun phrase, so we get "Mary collected the mushrooms" where
the mushrooms is a noun phrase. But in the case of the nominaliz ation "collection",
that same theme, the thing that gets collected, gets expressed as a PP, as a Prepositional
Phrase, headed by "of", so we get "Mary's collection of the mushrooms". This is actually
a completely general fact about nominals in English. So we've seen that verbs vary in
what kind of complements they take, so some verbs take just noun phrase complements, so
you get "I love my mother". Some verbs select PP complements, so you get things like "I
rely on my mother". And other verbs select CP complements, so "I think that my mother
is trustworthy." In the case of the nominal, we find PP complements, so you can have "my
reliance on my mother", we can have CP complements "my belief that my mother is trustworthy",
but we actually don't find NP complements, so you don't get "my love my mother", you
get "my love of my mother". So it seems that what corresponds to an NP complement in the
case of a verb phrase is a PP complement headed by "of" inside a noun phrase. And we'll see
that in all of the, or in many of the examples that we're going to look at. The interpretation
that we get for these nominals suggests that these nouns can assign thematic roles in just
the way that verbs can. So in a sentence like "Mathilda hates cats" we know that the first
noun phrase that we get "Mathilda" is interpreted as the experiencer of the emotion of hatred,
and the second noun phrase, the complement of the noun phrase, the object, is interpreted
as the thing that arouses that emotion. In exactly a similar way, the nominalization,
we would get "Mathilda's hatred of cats" and again "Mathilda" is obligatorily interpreted
as the person experiencing the emotion, and the other noun phrase inside that "of" PP
is interpreted as the thing arousing the emotion. So that looks very similar, between what we're
finding inside the verb phrase in the sentence, and inside the noun phrase.
One difference, however, is that we've seen that arguments of verbs are frequently, although
not always, obligatory. So, for example, "admire": you can say "we admired the city", but it's
really odd and I would say ungrammatical to just say "we admired" or even just "admired".
But in the case of the nominal, in the case of the noun "admiration", you can certainly
express both of those arguments, and they will get the same thematic roles and the same
ones will be assigned to the right and to the left, so you'll get a noun phrase like
"her admiration of him was surprising". At the same time, though, those two arguments
don't have to be expressed for the nominal to be grammatical. So, for example, you can
say "he wanted her admiration", where you just have the noun phrase "her admiration",
or even you can say "this sight commands admiration", where you just have the "admiration" on its
own. So this is a general property, it seems, between noun phrases and verb phrases or sentences.
The arguments in verb phrases and in sentences are often obligatory, but in noun phrases
they never seem to be obligatory.
It also is a consequence of this that we don't find expletive subjects inside noun phrases.
We've seen that in sentences there is a requirement, at least in English, that sentences have to
have a noun phrase in the subject position, even if there's no other reason for anything
to appear there, so this is what we've called "the subject requirement". For example, you
can say "three zebras suddenly appeared around the corner" or "there suddenly appeared three
zebras around the corner", but you can't say "appeared three zebras around the corner".
On the other hand, in the nominal, that form with "there" is ungrammatical. So you can
say "the appearance of three zebras around the corner surprised us" but you can't say
"there's appearance of three zebras around the corner surprised us. And that is consistent
with the idea that the subject requirement is a requirement inside sentences, and that
it's the only reason why you have that "there" where it appears here; it's filling this empty
subject position, and the sentence requires that there should be something in that position.
You find a similar case, for example, you can say "no proof of this conjecture exists"
where "no proof of this conjecture" is in the subject position, or you can get the sentence
"there exists no proof of this conjecture", where the initial position, that subject position
is occupied by "there". If you don't have the proof of the conjecture in the subject
position you have to have that "there"; it's ungrammatical to say "exists no proof of this
conjecture". But in the noun phrase, it's different. So you can have instead "the existence
of the proof is disputed" but not "there's existence of the proof is disputed", so you
don't find expletives in noun phrases because the subject requirement doesn't apply in noun phrases.