Constituency of Verb Phrases

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Constituency of Verb Phrases
Grammars and Lexicons 11-721 Fall Term, 2005
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A class participation exercise(based on Radford,
Chapter 3, exercise IX)

• Goals of the exercise
• Relying on tests when your intuition fails
• Adapting to inconsistent results
• (e.g., find evidence for disqualifying some of
  the tests)
• The five trees on the following slide have all
  been proposed by linguists, in published
  articles, for the sentence He has been writing a
  letter.
• Unlike the previous exercise with particles and
  PPs, people do not have a feeling about which
  structure is correct.
• We will learn several more tests for
  constituency, and apply them to these sentences
  in order to pick one of the trees as the correct
  one.
• The answer comes out different every year
  (depending on grammaticality judgments).

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TREE 1
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Test 3 Deletion

• A constituent can be deleted, if you can identify
  an appropriate meaning-preserving deletion rule.

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Verb Phrase Deletion

• A meaning preserving deletion rule for VP (verb
  phrases)
• John was writing a letter and Bill was writing a
  letter too.
• John was writing a letter and Bill was writing a
  letter too.
• John was writing a letter and Bill was too.
• Condition you need to leave behind an auxiliary
  verb or insert do if there was no auxiliary verb.
• John wrote a letter and Bill wrote a letter too.
• John wrote a letter and Bill did too.

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Note to myself. Feel free to read it.

• John wrote a letter and Bill too.
• Stripping, not verb phrase deletion.
• Sam likes chocolate, and vanilla too.
• Sam likes chocolate and Sam likes vanilla too.
• Looks like a non-constituent was deleted (so its
  not left-peripheral ellipsis either).
• It is still a test for constituency because the
  piece left behind has to be a constituent (I
  think).

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Test 4 Pro-Forms

• A pronoun can substitute for a noun
• Sam went to school.
• He went to school.
• Other pro-forms can substitute for other parts of
  speech.

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A Pro-VP Do so

• Put do in the same form as the verb you are
  substituting it for.
• John wrote a letter and Bill wrote a letter too.
• John wrote a letter and Bill did so too.
• Write and do are in the past tense.
• John was singing and Bill was singing too.
• John was singing and Bill was doing so too.
• Sing and doing are present participles (gerund
  form).

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A meaning-preserving movement rule for VPs

• I thought he was singing and he was singing.
• I thought he was singing and singing he was
  singing.
• I thought he was singing and singing he was.
• Like Verb Phrase Deletion, this movement rule
  must leave an auxiliary verb behind. If there is
  no auxiliary verb, insert do as an auxiliary
  verb.
• I thought he would sing a song and he did sing a
  song.
• I thought he would sing a song and sing a song he
  did.

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Test 5 Adverb Placement

• VP Adverb
• Completely he can rely on my support.
• He completely can rely on my support.
• He can completely rely on my support.
• He can rely completely on my support.
• He can rely on my support completely.

• Sentence Adverb
• Certainly he can rely on my support.
• He certainly can rely on my support.
• He can certainly rely on my support.
• He can rely certainly on my support.
• ?He can rely on my support certainly.

Note With certainty vs it is certain that
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Adverb placement

• Sentence adverbs must be immediately dominated by
  a node labeled S.
• VP adverbs must be immediately dominated by a
  node labeled VP.