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Possessive pronouns are an especially tricky case. They clearly function semantically like nouns. So for example, Susan’s father might be the same person as her father, where her refers to Susan. In chapter 5, you’ll see cases where possessive pronouns behave like pronouns with respect to a phenomenon called binding. But in other regards, possessive pronouns actually behave more like determiners: they are in complementary distribution with determiners (*the her book). They appear at the beginning of the noun phrase. This gives possessive pronouns the flavor of a determiner. So are possessive pronouns a subcategory of noun or a subcategory of determiners? That’s a really tricky question. Once you learn about head movement in chapter 10, you might consider an analysis where they start out as nouns and become determiners via the mechanism of head movement. But for the first part of this book, it’s probably easier just to treat them as determiners, because they normally appear in the same syntactic positions as determiners.

4.2 Subcategories of Verbs

There are really two major ways in which we can divide up verbs into subcategories. One is along the lines of tense/finiteness (i.e., whether the verb is left, leaves, (will) leave or (to) leave). We’re going to leave these distinctions aside until chapter 9, although I hope it is obvious by now how we’d use features to distinguish among them, even if the precise features we’d use aren’t defined yet. The other way to divvy up verbs is in terms of the number of noun phrases (NPs) and prepositional phrases (PPs) or clauses (CPs) they require. This second kind of division is known as argument structure.

In order to discuss argument structure, we first need to define some basic terms. If you took grammar in school, you probably learned that “every sentence has a subject and a predicate.” Under your schoolroom definitions, the subject is usually the first noun phrase (that is, the first noun and all things that go along with it), and the predicate is everything else in the sentence. So for example, in (23) the subject is the dastardly phonologist, and the predicate would be stole the syntactician’s lunch.

23) [The dastardly phonologist][stole the syntactician’s lunch].

subject predicate (traditional definitions)

The definition of subject isn’t too bad (we’ll refine it later though), but syntacticians use the term “predicate” entirely differently. The syntactician’s definition of predicate is based on the mathematical notion of a “relation”. The predicate defines the relation between the individuals being talked about and the real world – as well as among themselves. The entities (which can be abstract) participating in the relation are called arguments. To see how this works, look at the following example:

24) Gwen hit the baseball.

There are two arguments in this example, Gwen and the baseball. These are elements in the world that are participants in the action described by the sentence. The predicate here is hit. Hit expresses a relation between the two arguments: more precisely, it indicates that the first argument (Gwen) is applying some force on the second argument (the baseball). This may seem patently self-evident, but it’s important to understand what is going on here on an abstract level. This usage of the terms predicate and argument is identical to how they are used in formal logic.

We can speak about any particular predicate’s argument structure. This refers to the number of arguments that a particular predicate requires. Another name for argument structure is valency. Take, for example, predicates that take only one argument (i.e., they have a valency of 1). These are predicates like smile, arrive, sit, run, etc. The property of transitivity refers to how many arguments follow the verb. In predicates with a valency of 1, no arguments follow the verb (the single argument precedes the verb), so these predicates are said to be intransitive. Predicates that take two obligatory arguments have a valency of 2; some examples are hit, love, see, kiss, admire, etc. These predicates are said to be transitive, because they have a single argument after the verb (the other argument precedes the verb). Finally predicates that take three arguments have a valency of 3. Putand give are the best examples of this class. These predicates have two arguments after the verb so are said to be ditransitive.

25) Transitivity	Valency	Example
Intransitive	1 argument	smile, arrive
Transitive	2 arguments	hit, love, kiss
Ditransitive	3 arguments	give, put

In determining how many arguments a predicate has, we only consider the obligatory NPs and PPs. Optional ones are never counted in the list of arguments. Only obligatory elements are considered arguments.

Predicates not only restrict the number of arguments that appear with them, they also restrict the categories of those arguments. A verb like ask can take either an NP or a clause (embedded sentence = CP) as a complement:

26)

1 I asked [NP the question].

2 I asked [CP if you knew the answer].

But a verb like hit can only take an NP complement:

27)

1 I hit [NP the ball].

2 *I hit [CP that you knew the answer].

With these basics in mind, we can set up a series of features based on how many and what kind of arguments a verb takes.

Let’s start with intransitives. These require a single NP subject. We’ll mark this with the feature [NP] where the underscore represents where the verb would go in the sentence. An example of such a verb would be leave.

Most transitive verbs require an NP object, so we can mark these with the feature [NP NP]. An example of this is the verb hit, seen above in (27). Verbs like ask (see 26 above), think, say, etc. allow either an NP object or a CP (embedded clause) object. We can mark this using curly brackets {} and a slash. {NP/CP} means “a choice of NP or CP”. So the feature structure for predicates like this is [NP {NP/CP}].

Ditransitive verbs come in several major types. Some ditransitives require two NP objects (the first is an indirect object, the other a direct object). The verb spare is of this category. It does not allow an NP and a PP:

28)

1 I spared [NP him] [NP the trouble].

2 *I spared [NP the trouble] [PP to him].

This category of ditransitive is marked with the feature [NP NP NP]. The opposite kind of ditransitive is found with the verb put. Put requires an NP and a PP:

29)

1 *I put [NP the box] [NP the book].

2 I put [NP the book] [PP in the box].

This kind of ditransitive takes the feature [NP NP PP]. We also have ditransitives that appear to be a combination of these two types and allow either an NP or a PP in the second position:

30)

1 I gave [NP the box] [PP to Leah].

2 I gave [NP Leah] [NP the box].

These have the feature [NP NP {NP/PP}]. Finally we have ditransitives that take either two NPs, or one NP and one CP, or an NP and a PP:

31)

1 I told [NP Daniel] [NP the story].

2 I told [NP Daniel] [CP that the exam was cancelled].

3 I told [NP the story] [PP to Daniel].

Verbs like tell have the feature [NP NP {NP/PP/CP}].

The following chart summarizes all the different subcategories of verb we’ve discussed here:

32)

Subcategory	Example
V[NP__] (intransitive)	leave
V[NP ___ NP] (transitive type 1)	hit
V[NP ___ {NP/CP}] (transitive type 2)	ask
V[NP ___ NP NP] (ditransitive type 1)	spare
V[NP ___ NP PP] (ditransitive type 2)	put
V[NP ___ NP {NP/PP}] (ditransitive type 3)	give
V[NP ___ NP {NP/PP/CP}] (ditransitive type 4)	tell

There are other types of verbs that we haven’t listed here. We’ll introduce similar features as we need them.

You can now try WBE14, GPS12, and CPS6–9.