Syntax. Andrew Carnie

f) Vimos saw.1pl la casa the house de Juan. of Juan

      “We saw Juan’s house.”

       CPS9. IMPLICIT ARGUMENTS ¹⁷

       [Creative Thinking; Challenge]

      Above we claimed that the verb give requires either an NP and a PP or two NPs (i.e. Heidi gave a punchbowl to Andrew and Heidi gave Andrew a headache). But consider sentences like the following:

      1 I gave blood.

      2 I don’t give a darn.

      3 Andy gives freely of her time.

      4 Dan gave his life.

      Each of these might lead us to conclude that give requires fewer arguments than we have ^{claimed. Are these simply counterexamples to the claim thatgiveis of subcategory V}[NP

      ___ NP {NP/PP}] ^{or is something more complicated going on here?}

      A related but slightly different issue arises with sentences like those in (5) and (6).

      1 5) Dan gives to charity.

      2 6) Sorry, I gave last week.

      Will your solution for 1–4 work for these examples too?

      Notes

      1 1. Remember, the * symbol means that a sentence is syntactically ill-formed.

      2 2. Be careful here: the function of the word is clear (it is used to subordinate clauses inside of sentences) but it doesn’t have an obvious meaning with respect to the real world.

      3 3. The lists in this section are based on the discussions of English morphology found in Katamba (2004) and Harley (2006).

      4 4. There are verbs that begin with un-, but in these circumstances un- usually means “reverse”, not negation.

      5 5. In some prescriptive variants of English, there is a limited set of adverbs that can appear after is. For example, well is prescriptively preferred over good, in such constructions as I am well vs. I am good (referring to your state of being rather than the acceptability of your behavior). Most speakers of American English don’t allow any adverbs after is.

      6 6. Not all quantifiers can be determiners. For example, the quantifiers lot and least cannot function in this capacity (and are a noun and an adjective, respectively).

      7 7. The possessive forms mine, yours, hers, theirs, and ours are nouns, as are some uses of his and its(when there is no other noun in the NP).

      8 8. Auxiliaries are marked here as [+FINITE], but they can of course appear in non-finite clauses like I want to be dancing. When they do so, however, they aren’t marking the non-finite nature of the clause – the particle to is. The feature [±FINITE] is meant to indicate what function the word has, not where the word can appear.

      9 9. If you are interested in the details of what a system with a fully specified feature structure system might look like, have a look at Carnie (2011). But be warned that the theoretical framework outlined there is not completely compatible with the one discussed in this book.

      10 10. However, see the discussion of count vs. mass nouns below.

      11 11. Many native speakers of English will be able to “force” a reading onto much apple. But what they are doing is using apple as a mass noun (referring to the state of being an apple or the totality of apples in the universe). It is often possible to force a mass reading on count nouns, and a count reading on mass nouns (e.g., a water).

      12 12. Taken from the open source version at http://www.gutenberg.org/.

      13 13. Problem set contributed by Sheila Dooley.

      14 14. http://www.aetherlumina.com/gnp/index.html.

      15 15. Thanks to Jack Martin for suggesting this problem set.

      16 16. Data from Baker (2003).

      17 17. Thanks to Dave Medeiros for suggesting this problem set.