Pronouns CAS LX 522 • Pronouns differ from nouns in a couple of ways (example: case marking), and should Syntax I be considered a functional category. • The pronouns of English express person, number, and gender. Morphosyntactic features, part III • 1st person: I, me, we, us (2.4.2-) • 2nd person: you 4 • 3rd person: he, she, him, her, they, them, it.
Pronouns are Ds. Auxiliaries and modals
• Different from verbs: have, be, do, will, can, might, must, should, could, would, ... • We’ll come back to this again later on, but we will treat pronouns as having category • In questions, auxiliaries “invert” with the [D], like, say, the or which. subject, verbs don’t. 1) We linguists must stick together. • Will you leave? Can you leave? Do you leave often? *Leave you often?
Auxiliaries and modals Infinitival to
1) I like to go to the movies. Auxiliaries occur before not, verbs don’t • • Kind of looks like a preposition, but it’s not. • You will not leave. You did not leave. Prepositions take nouns, to as a P has a kind of *You left not. contentful meaning (endpoint of a path). Infinitival to takes (bare) verbs only, means nothing (apart from Notice the extra do— “do-support” • “untensed”). Auxiliaries are responsible for things like tense, • It might be more like a modal: To and modals (can, mood, modality, aspect, voice. • might, should) seem to appear in the same place • We abbreviate their category as [T] (“tense”). (between the subject and a bare verb form). Infinitival to Complementizers
1) Pat will leave. 2) I heard that Pat will leave. 1) I like that John can pick up his own dry- 3) I wonder if Pat will leave. cleaning. 4) I am anxious for Pat to leave. 2) I’d like for John to pick up his own dry- cleaning. • It is perfectly possible to embed a sentence inside another one. When we do this, it is indicated with a complementizer (introducing a complement clause). Category: [C].
The P for v. the C for The D that v. the C that
For is of course a preposition (I looked for you for • Same kind of thing holds for that. three hours), but not when it is introducing • clauses. 1) I liked that movie. • He headed right for the back row. 2) I heard that movie involved guinea pigs. • *He’d like right for the class to be over. • Sometimes you can replace for clauses with that clauses. • *He expressed interest in the class to be over. 1) It is important that Pat votes. • Who would you vote for in the election? 2) It is important for Pat to vote. • *Who are you anxious for to win the election?
Regrouping Regrouping
• Lexical categories: • But there are many more than four categories. • N: noun, V: verb, A: adjective, P: preposition • Aux: auxiliary, C: complementizer, Adv: adverb, D: determiner, PRN: pronoun, T: modals?, ... • We started a feature decomposition of these by proposing that they are labels for • So, we would need more features to make all feature bundles like [±N, ±V], which can of the distinctions. We won’t pursue that, characterize certain natural classes across however—we’ll just use the labels like N, V, A, categories. P, D, T, C, etc.) Lexical items Features of lexical items • Recall that part of our language knowledge is the knowledge of the lexicon. The lexicon is a list of the “words” • A lexical item is a bundle of properties. It is • a meaning, linked with instructions for • More accurately, it is a list of the things pronunciation, linked with syntactic sentences are made of. properties like category. • It is traditionally considered to be where • We represent these properties as features. “unpredictable” information is stored. The sound, the meaning, the grammatical category, and other features.
Features of lexical items English pronouns • The English pronouns make several distinctions over • Any given lexical item has: and above a singular/plural distinction. a. Semantic features • One distinction is person, which is sensitive to who is b. Phonological features talking and to whom. c. Syntactic features • English (and most languages) distinguish three When it comes to syntax, syntactic features certainly persons. • singular plural matter. But no language seems to arrange its sentences such that words that start with t are first. first person I we second person you you Hypothesis: Syntax can only “see” syntactic features. • third person he/she/it they
English pronouns English pronouns
• Rather, we want to use two features, which only • We could model person with [1], [2], and predict four. Slightly better. [3]—except that that predicts eight • By eliminating [3], we predict a system like that distinctions, and we have only three. below—as well as a [1,2] combination that is not morphologically distinguished in English.
singular plural singular plural first person [1] I we first person [1] I we second person [2] you you second person [2] you you third person [3] he/she/it they third person [3] he/she/it they English pronouns English pronouns
• What about [1,2]? There’s no special pronoun form, but what would it mean? • Some languages distinguish inclusive and exclusive we morphologically, e.g., Dakota. • Well, [1] is the speaker, [2] is the person being spoken to. So [1,2,pl] would be we (including • No languages seem to distinguish 8 persons. you). Not the same as [1,pl], we (excluding you).
singular plural singular plural first person [1] I we first person [1] I we second person [2] you you second person [2] you you third person [3] he/she/it they third person [3] he/she/it they
Phi-features Gender ( -features) • Many languages distinguish nouns on the • Collectively, person, number, and gender basis of “gender” as well. features are referred to as -features. • English: she/he/it (3rd person pronouns) • These are the features that are generally involved in subject-verb agreement. • Gender often comes in 2-3 flavors (masculine, feminine, neuter) which often • We group them together because they corresponds roughly to biological gender seem to have their effects together (that is, where applicable. not separately).
Case features Case names In English, we distinguish nominative (on English pronouns change form also depending on • • subjects), genitive (on possessors), and where they are in the sentence. accusative (elsewhere) 1) He left. I saw him. He saw me. Singular Plural • The information about syntactic position is encoded Nom Acc Gen Nom Acc Gen by case features. I me my we us our ‣ In English, case is only visible on pronouns. you you your you you your ‣ In many other languages, case is visible on all nouns he him his they them their (and sometimes on words modifying nouns, like she her her they them their adjectives or determiners). it it its they them their Features & pronunciation Features & pronunciation
• Lexical items are • At the A-P interface • Not every distinction: The structure of the paradigm bundles of features. [Acc, 1, sg, PRN] is can give us clues as to how Only 3rd person Like [Acc, 1, sg, PRN]. interpreted as “me” ‣ singular distinguishes the interface rules work. gender. The syntactic system Singular Plural Singular Plural • 2nd person does not arranges these lexical Nom Acc Gen Nom Acc Gen ‣ distinguish number or Nom Acc Gen Nom Acc Gen items into sentences, I me my we us our between Nom and I me my we us our Acc. and then hands the you you your you you your you you your you you your 3rd person singular result off to the A-P he him his they them their ‣ feminine doesn’t he him his they them their and C-I systems (at she her her they them their distinguish between she her her they them their the interfaces) Acc and Gen. it it its they them their it it its they them their
Verbal features Verbal features
• We can characterize present tense as being • Some features are specific to verbs. non-past, non-future. • [past], for example, differentiating write • In English, future is expressed in other from wrote, kick from kicked. This is a tense ways, with a modal (will) or with the verb feature. go. English does not seem to make use of the [future] feature; in English there is just Some languages have a special form of the • past and non-past. verb for the future as well; [future]. • Cf. duals and the use of [sg] on nouns.
Participles Participles
• English verbs can also take on a participle form: • Adger’s proposal: writing, written. ‣ Present participle: [V, part] (writing) • Not tense, but aspect. ‣ Past participle: [V, part, past] (written) The -ing form (“present participle”) comes after I distance myself from that because it is not at ‣ be, indicating a continuing event. • all clear that the [past] feature in Adger’s past The -en form (“past participle”) comes after have, ‣ indicating a completed event. participle has anything in common with the [past] feature in an actual past tense. A better Tense can still be expressed—on the auxiliary: I have • name would be, e.g., [perf]. written, I had written, I am writing, I was writing. Bare verb/infinitive Verb agreement 1) I want to win the lottery. • Verbs very often (across languages) agree with the subject in -features as well. • The bare form of the verb (often appearing after to) is the infinitive. 1) I eat bagels. • We will assign infinitive forms the feature [Inf]. 2) He eats bagels. • The fact that the infinitive is a bare verb (no 3) They eat bagels. suffixes or other inflection) in English may be However, eat isn’t really “plural” in any sense. something of a coincidence. Other languages • Plurality is a property of the subject, but it is mark the infinitive with a special verb form, on a reflected in the morphology of the verb. par with participles or tensed verbs.
Verb agreement Summary:
• In English, only finite verbs show agreement Categories: N, V, Adv, A, P, D, T, Aux, C (those that are not infinitives or participles). • Nominal features: case ([nom],[acc], In fact, only present tense verbs do, with the • • [gen]), -features: person ([1],[2]), number single exception of the copula (be). ([pl]), gender ([fem]) In other languages, agreement sometimes • Verbal features: tense ([inf],[past]), aspect appears on other forms. Participles, for • ([part], [perf]) example, sometimes agree with their object. Infinitives very rarely agree with anything.