The lexicon Syntax and lexical items Why have

The lexicon Syntax and lexical items

• Why have a chapter on dictionaries in a book on syntax? • The answer is simple and indisputable: syntax cannot be isolated from other areas of language; and individual lexical items, particularly verbs, exercise strong control over syntactic structure.

• Syntactic constructions, however, are not identical with specific clauses; particular clauses do not appear until lexical items are inserted into a general syntactic structure. For example, • the structure Noun Phrase–Verb–Noun Phrase corresponds to indefinitely many clauses: • The dog chewed its bone The cat scratched the dog Dogs like meat • • The process of insertion is not simple. As mentioned above, particular lexical items only fit into particular pieces of structure – some verbs combine with one noun phrase, others with two, and a third set of verbs with three.

• information about the interplay between lexical items and syntactic • structure has always been available in all but the smallest dictionaries. • Chambers 20 th Century Dictionary • (1983), for example, includes the follow • ing information in the entry for • knife • .

Example of word • Knife [naïf]; an instrument for cutting; verb transitive: to cut knifeless ; knifing the act of putting a knife into someone war to the knife have one’s knife in

• The entry gives some information about syntax; the verb is described as transitive, which means that in the basic ACTIVE DECLARATIVE construction it requires a noun phrase to its right. There is a rough guide to the pronunciation which does not use the International Phonetic Alphabet, a definition of the meaning of the noun, two words that are derived from the basic stem and two idiomatic phrases. The entry would not be very useful for a non-native speaker with a limited knowl -edge of English, but the dictionary is intended primarily for native speakers.

Individual verbs, complements and adjuncts • In Chapter 1, we discussed the concepts of complement and adjunct. Every type of phrase has a head, and the modifiers of heads fall into the two classes of complement and adjunct. The distinction applies best to the modifiers of verbs, for which it was originally developed and which are the focus of Chapter 1. Complements are modifiers which typically occur next to the head (but not always) and which are required or excluded by particular lexical items. Sarah and the cakes are complements of devoured. Devoured requires a noun phrase to its left and a noun phrase to its right – *Sarah devoured is unacceptable. • (1) Sarah devoured the cakes in the kitchen last night.

Classes of verbs and subcategorisation restrictions Intransitive Verb despair Transitive Verb slight Ditransitive Verb gave Intransitive Locational Verb sat Transitive Directional Verb handed Copula seemed

Selectional restrictions • Lexical entries also contains information about the roles assigned to the nouns and clauses. • The computer will calculate the value of the variable.

Classes of nouns • • • Concrete vs abstract Common vs proper Count vs mass Animate vs inanimate Human vs non-human

Fixed phrases • Polywords • Institutionalized expressions • Highly constrained phrases • Sentence builders

Video: Nouns • https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=JHWwli M 8 D 08 • https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=Xk. Mk. NIo g. XRs