Basic English Grammar with Exercises - MEK

Chapter 1 - Grammatical Foundations: Words(78) a Larry left = sentenceb Theodore thinks Larry leftFrom a semantic point of view, these verbs take a proposition as their complement andthis obviously is expressed as a sentence. We might therefore suppose a lexical entrysuch as the following:(79) think category: [–F, –N, +V]-grid: subcat:[sentence]There is no traditional term specifically for predicates with sentential complements,but generative grammar has not felt the need to invent one as the subcategorisationframe serves to distinguish between the different subcategories of verbs.3.4.2 NounsThe next category we will discuss is the noun, which we categorised as bearing thefeatures [–F, +N, –V] above. With verbs, they share the property that they have -grids as part of their lexical entries, being [–F] categories. But they are distinguishedfrom verbs on the other two features and hence do not share many other properties.From a morphological point of view, nouns are less varied than verbs, having justtwo forms, singular and plural:(80) dog dogspass passesmouse micebuffalo buffalocherub cherubimLike verbs there is a fair amount of deviation from the regular morphologicalrepresentation of the plural [s]. Again, we will ignore the morphological irregularitiesand treat these forms as being syntactically stem + plural:(81) dog + s = dogspass + s = passesmouse + s = micebuffalo + s = buffalocherub + s = cherubimBesides morphological irregularity, there are also a number of problematic cases.Some nouns express concepts for which number distinctions are not normally made.For example, sand refers to stuff that naturally comes in a quantity for which thedivision into ‘one’ (singular) and ‘more than one’ (plural) is not particularly natural.Nouns which naturally accommodate this distinction are known as count nouns andthose that do not are called mass nouns. If we wish to individuate mass nouns, weusually do this in terms of another noun which names a unit of what the mass nounrefers to and put this into a more complicated construction, known as the partitive:(82) a three grains of sandb seven loaves of breadc two cups of tea24