To sum up, just as adjuncts PP are similar to attributes NP, they share some structural features, COMPLs PP are similar to COMPLs (NP)Īdjective phrase (AP) is another type of attributes it takes after the attributive NP in the sense that they have the same order:įrom the above analysis, it can be noticed that AP has the same syntactic level just as N’ level (that is to say a sister of N’), this structural feature allows us to say AP is as the same as adjuncts PP in that they can be stacked:Ĭoncluding by the rules: The Rules of nominal post-modifiers *A university and chemistry student (false).The thing here is that both biology student and university student are both N’ phrasal category, but at different levels and to justify this, let’s look at coordination: Therefore, we assume that the possible order is ‘’a university English student’’ and that ATTRIBUTE (NP) comes before COMPL (NP). The order of constituents in (g) is the only syntactic possibility that sounds more correct, because one can’t have an order such as an English university student (it sounds a bit more ambiguous because we don’t know whether English modify university or student). The reason to re-mention these rules is to show that ADJUNCTS (PP) are just as the same as ATTRIBUTES (NS) and that COMPLS (PP) is just the same as COPMLS (NP) But, before plunging into the process of distinguishing COMPLs (N) from attributes (N), it would so much helpful to re-mention again that the section of post-modifiers above was concluded with the following rules: There are three types of nominal pre-modifiers namely: determiner, complement N, and attribute N. ‘’A teacher’’ or ‘’a teacher of linguistics’’ are two semantic features that can strictly be attributed to Ahmed. Therefore, and as it is noticed from syntactic division. The semantic evidence states that each category determines a semantic feature It’s safe to conclude that only elements of the same level can be conjoined. Therefore, they can be attached at the level of N’, whereas COMPLS are sisters of N, they can be attached at the level of N. *The teacher of English and with blue eyes (false)īasically, adjuncts and complements are attached at different levels, ADJUNCTS are sisters of N’.The man with blue eyes and with chubby face.The teacher of linguistics and geography.The teacher īut can’t construct syntactic structures like:Īnd this logically leads us to another piece of evidence that claims that only elements of the same syntactic attributes can be coordinated:.Taking into consideration the rules above (adjunct can exist at the level of N’), it could be possible to generate phrases with more than adjuncts. Note: the brackets have to do with the optionality of the constituent To conclude, the three modifiers (DET, COMPL, and ADJUNCT) can actually generate the following rules: The of linguistics was the one who I met yesterday. Therefore, it would be impossible to do this: To clarify this, teacher of linguistics can only be replaced by one, which in a sense shows that can stand by itself as a nominal phrase. Ex: The new is better than the last one.
The second evidence elucidates that this sort of nominal phrase can only be joined with another nominal phrase that has the same syntactic attributes (since it has been mentioned in the previous chapter that only equivalent phrases can be coordinated).
This sort of evidence states that this generalized category can take independently a certain distribution within the sentence for instance: The reason why linguists consider this syntactic unit as an in-between category is as matter of fact explained by a bunch of evidence. Linguists argue that while (teacher) is a nominal phrase teacher of linguistics is also a nominal phrase.
In more expressive words, a category that is smaller than phrasal categories and bigger than lexical ones should be inserted to adequately describe the syntactic components of the sentence.Ĭonsider the following table: X Word level As a reaction, the extended standard theory or which is known as X bar syntax came to prove that there must be three categories in the hierarchical representation of the sentence. However, this claim was not supported by enough evidence. Phrase Structure Grammar was based on the assumption that there are two types of syntactic categories (word-level and phrase-level categories) that together make up the sentence of a natural language (Ex: English). A summary of X bar theory for university students
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