Appunti esame Lingua Inglese I, Bibbò - Stewart

Word Classes

(noun, verb, adjective, adverbs, prepositions etc.)

Phrases

(= sintagmi) (noun phrase, verb phrase, adjective phrase, prepositional phrase etc.)

Clauses

(main = independent, dependent)

Sentences

(declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory etc.)

48 FUNCTIONS

Subject

Predicator

Complement (subject and object)

Object (direct and indirect)

Adverbials

Noun phrases

They can carry number, they can be countable or uncountable, they can express cases and if they are personal pronouns they can exhibit number, gender and cases.

The centre of the noun phrase is either a NOUN or a PRONOUN. It is known as the head of the noun phrase:

- A Roman candle. CANDLE is the head of the NP

- A Roman candle on the table. A NP can include a prepositional phrase (PP)

- A Roman candle that we bought. A NP can include a relative clause part of the noun phrase

Noun phrases can be as small as a single pronoun and they can also be pretty large.

The structure of a noun phrase

The internal structure of the

noun phrase: you have a head noun, but also a number of other constituents. The first position is occupied by determinative phrases (or determinatives). Ex. Articles, demonstratives, indefinite pronouns (every, most, many → is a tricky case because some grammarians do not consider it a demonstrative and the same issue is present for number because some grammarians consider them adjectives rather than determinative phrases). In the second position you would have adjective phrases, which usually immediately precede the head noun. We can also have post-modifiers such as prepositional phrases and relative clauses.

49- The only obligatory element is the head noun (or pronoun), but depending on the sentence, determiners might be required. Compare:

1. I have worked on a great project
2. *I have worked on great project

You generally do not need determiners with plural or non-count (uncountable) nouns

3. I have worked on great projects

Pre-modifiers- "expensive" and

“beautiful” are adjective phrases because we can expand them and the sentence remains grammatical:

• The unbelievably expensive house on the hill
• You should bear in mind that the head noun can be modified by other word classes (that is, not just by adjectives as in the earlier examples)

Some examples:

• The galvanized iron [the modifier is a past participle to galavnize]
• A space odyssey [the modifier is a noun]

Post-modifiers:

Modifiers following the noun. They are commonly expressed by the use of preposition (prepositional phrases).

In “the expensive house on the hill” the noun is modified by something that follows it.

1. The beginning of a beautiful friendship noun phrase with prepositional phrase (of a beautiful friendship)
2. The cameras inside the White House
3. An issue with my colleagues

They are all noun phrases introduced by a preposition: Prepositional phrases [PP].

Post-modifiers can be relative clauses, as in “every beautiful city that we

When APs are themselves post-modified, they follow the noun. Compare:- →The boys excited by the film the adjective phrase is post-modified- *The excited by the film boys 50→Exceptions: marketing, advertising complex adjective phrases: a must-have (verb used as an adjective and modifier) mobile phone, an easy to open …Some simple adjectives can modify nouns as post-modifiers (it’s usually in very official bureaucratic expressions):

1. Heir apparent
2. Time immemorial
3. Things Irish

They are exceptions and you should be using them only when you are confident it is the right thing to do.

“There is no longest sentence and there is no non-arbitrary upper bound to sentence length." (Hauser et al., 2002, p. 1571). you can also add phrases- NP of NP = [the brother of [the sister of [the mother of [Frank]]]]- “The occurrence of a prepositional phrase within a noun phrase is one example of a more general phenomenon in syntax, embedding: the

"inclusion of one structure within another structure." (Meyer 2009: 122)- Recursion is the repeated embedding of similar structures:

1. Numerous books with yellow covers about realistic characters of various kind in→gripping novels Within the prepositional phrase you have the noun phrase

The position of pronouns:

1. The expensive house on the hill was sold.
2. If a pronoun replaced the noun, we would have
• *the expensive it on the hill was sold.
• *the expensive it on the it was sold.
3. In reality, the pronoun replaces the entire NOUN PHRASE:
• It [i.e. "the expensive house on the hill"] was sold.
4. This is a really useful [substitution] test to establish if a string of words is a NP. 51

Verb phrases

Tense and time

We should distinguish between TIME and TENSE:

Finite verbs carry "tense", that is they are marked as either present or past in English→ morphology ( in several ways)

there is no morphological way for an English verb to carry future tense

The simple present tense (you are not necessarily talking about the present time) can be used for events happening in the present, but also for a number of other occurrences:

1. Habitual acts: I smoke, I eat meat etc. [compare with I am smoking → it means at least two things] the equivalent for Italian is 'sto andando, sto fumando' has become more and more acceptable
2. Events in the future: The train arrives at 5

Two main perspectives:

According to Quirk at al. (1985) a verb phrase consists only of a lexical verb (the head of the phrase) and one or more auxiliary verbs.

The structure is as follows:

1. I must be dreaming! VB = must be dreaming modals + primary auxiliaries + lexical verb

Therefore in a sentence such as I bought bread, the VP is bought

2. I bought bread VB = bought lexical verb

A more expansive definition includes post-verbal noun phrases:

In this case the VP would be 'bought bread'

The substitution test works well

here:- We can replace both the verb and the noun phrase with the “pro-verb” do, not just the verb.

1. Did you buy bread?
2. Yes, I did 52

Can the VP include adverb phrases? →

1. I could only buy those tomatoes [only belongs to the VP] we mean that the only thing you could by was tomatoes, the position is between the bare form and the modal verb →
2. I could buy only those tomatoes [only belongs to the NP] we are asked to buy a certain kind of tomatoes and we bought another

The meaning of the two sentences is therefore different

Adverb phrases- Although it is common for adverb phrases to be one word in length, if the adverb head expresses degree it can be intensified with the same adverbs used to intensify adjectives: very recently, somewhat skillfully, quite erratically.

Lingua Inglese I - Week 5

Constituency

The notion of constituency is at the center of syntax- The way we divide a sentence is mirrored the fact that is an organization of constituency and elements, with words

that in some way belong together and form something that make sense

- Syntactic units are not arbitrary strings of words

- Being together is somehow meaningful

- They are relative to the level of structure that we analyze

- All single words are constituency but we have to be able to put them together in a logical way to make them meaningful

- → → → Sentence Clause Phrase Words 53

Take this sentence:

The court ruled against him and a local hero was evicted from his house on 1. Monday

• Headline
• Clauses coordinated, conjoined through a conjunction and the entire sentence is constituent at the level of text, paragraph
• If we define the sentence in the two main clauses, we see they’re constituent to the sentence

• These two clauses are constituents of the sentence

1. The court ruled against him
2. a local hero was evicted from his house on Monday

• These two phrases are constituents of the first clause
• “The court”
• “ruled against him”

phrase• Two main immediate constituents- These two phrases (one verbal, one prepositional) are constituents of the VerbPhrase “ruled” and “against him”1.

• The two phrases are constituent of the first clause- These two words are constituents of the Prepositional Phrase“Against” and “him”1.

- Immediate and ultimate constituents

• Immediate depends on the level of announces- →Phrases immediate consistent of the clause, single words immediate constituents of certain phrases →

• Ultimate are towards the lowest level of syntactical analysis that we consider immediate constituents are ultimate constituent 54

• Every time we consider a string of words we should figure it out if it’s constituent and at which level

The same string of words can be a constituent in one case and not in another:

[Born and raised Berliner Walter] [spent most of his life in Germany]1. [Because he was a born and raised Berliner] [Walter]

[spent most of his life in2. Germany]

• The string “born and raised Berliner Walter” appears in both sentences, but its elements belong to different constituents.

Constituency tests

Main tests

- You do not need to run all the tests to find out if a string of words is a constituent. Usually, if you get three positive results from the main ones (listed below), you can be confident enough

1. Substitution
   • It is one of the most reliable tests. If this fails, then the string is unlikely to be a constituent.
2. Moveable adverb/insertion
3. Movement
4. Co-ordination
5. Sentence fragment

Substitution

• →the most reliable of all tests if single word doesn’t get a positive result with the substitution test it’s probably not a constituent

If the string we are investigating can be replaced by a word (primarily pronouns, but also other verbs), the string is likely to be a constituent

1. [The seething crowd] [[swallowed] [the policemen]]⇣ → → ✓
2. It swallowed them can