LIN 1310 –Syntactic Notes and Trees Part 3
In examples 24 through 26, we saw that English permits Verbraising for auxiliary verbs perfect ‘have’ and progressive ‘be’. This
move occurs when there is no modal to be inverted with I+tense in
questions.
This resulted in:
24. Has the dog bitten the cat?
25. Is the dog biting the cat?
26. Has the dog been biting the cat?
However, we also saw that questions that contain neither a modal,
nor perfect ‘have’, nor progressive ‘be’ require ‘do-insertion’ to
occur prior to inversion.
This is because English does not permit true verbs to be raised.
There is one exception to this prohibition:
The copular verb ‘be’ can be raised in English.
Thus we get sentences such as:
I. Am I a person?
II. Is George happy?
Note that although sentences I and II have neither modals, nor
perfect ‘have’ nor progressive ‘be’, the move ‘do-insertion’ was
not part of their derivation.
These sentences are derived as follows:
French also has verb-raising, but, as we will see in the
following examples, its application is different from in
English.
These are the kinds of differences that linguists consider
when they are trying to delimit the ways that languages
express universal grammar.
Now let us consider German.
Look at Exercise 12 on page 173 of O&A.
Can you tell if German has the Verb Raising Transformation?
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We will now look at how syntactic theory handles some other
aspects of English syntax:
Adjectival Phrases
Adverbial Phrases
Relative Clauses
Coordination
Relative Clauses
Relative clauses have lot in common with wh-questions:
They begin with a wh-word – ‘which, who, what, that’
However, in relative clauses, sometimes the wh word is deleted as
in: John is the boy ___I told you about.
The wh-word that appears in the final form of a sentence has been
moved from its original position in D-structure to the beginning of
the embedded relative clause
This is accomplished by the Move Transformation Wh-movment.
In D-structure, relative clauses are attached as complements, but
they branch directly from XP.
In the D-structure of a relative clause, a +rel appears under C.
Recall that in the D-structure of wh-question, +Q appears under C.
The derivation of a relative clause is shown on page 162 of O&A
for the sentence ‘The car [which Leslie bought] was a lemon’ .
As the full D-structure is not shown in the text, it appears on the
following page of these notes.
After you have looked over the derivation of ‘The car which Leslie
bought was a lemon’, try the following sentences:
The picture which I hung fell.
We saw the boy who won the race.
Full D-structure-re: O&A page 162
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The relative pronoun as the subject the relative clause
Notice that the wh-word ‘who’ is the subject of the relative
clause in the sentence:
We saw the boy [who won the race].
relative clause
Although ‘who’ does not appear to have undergone whmovement, it actually has.
This is similar to questions in which the wh-word is the
subject of the sentence, as in:
Who at the pizza?
wh-question
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