Functional categories ( Coordinate conjunction, determiner, negation,

particle,preposition ,subordinate conjunction)

Lexical categories ( Adjective,adverb,noun,verb,preposition)
Functional categories of a verb:
1)The verb phrase head (A verb phrase consists of a verb plus any modifiers ,
complements,particle, auxiliaries, modal verbs , have and be) Ex:read,
returned,have borrowed
2)The predicate of a clause. (A clause is defined as a grammatical structure that
consists of a subject and a predicate)
3)The noun phrase modifier. (Noun phrase modifiers are defined as words and
phrases that describe a noun or a noun phrase) Ex: The woman reading the book
just yelled at me
4)The adjective phrase complement. (Adjective phrase complements are defined as
phrases and clauses that complete the meaning of an adjective phrase.) Ex: You
should be excited to study grammar
5)The verb phrase complement. (Verb phrase complements are defined as phrases
that complete the meaning of a verb phrase. ) Ex: The students have to pass the
test (infinitive)
Simple Sentence contains at least one subject and one predicate.
Complex Sentence is a sentence in which one of the syntactic roles is played by
an embedded sentence. I made students read Chomsky.
Main sentences are said to consist of a main clause ,with a subordinate clause
imbedded into its structure .
Embedded clause is a clause (a group of words that includes a subject and a verb
) that is within a main clause, usually marked by commas.
Romanian is a negative concord language/ English is a non-negative concord
language
Types of scope of negations:
a)word negation(realized by means of negative affixes, mostly prefixes:
unhappy ,dislike
b)phrasal negation (the negation not may adjoin to any phrase, taking scope
over it.No,not)
He came to the party not long ago, didnt he?
c)sentence negation (a sentence is negative when its predicate is negated, when
its Inflection is negative)

Test how to see if the sentence is negative:

a)Tag questions. Negative sentences take affirmative tags, and vice versa:
Mary is happy about her job, is she?
b)Not even tag sentences require a negative host sentence:
George doesnt like smart girls, not even pretty ones.
c)Either conjoining. Two coordinated sentences can have the form S1 and S2
either, only if the second is negative.
Jack stayed at home all day and Mary didnt go anyplace either.
d)Neither tags require negative hosts. Affirmative sentences are followed by sotags:
Jack doesnt like linguistics and neither does Mary
Jack dislikes linguistics and so does Mary
Types of negative sentences (Three classes)
a) Sentences where negation is in the Auxiliary (Bob has lost my respect; Bob
abandoned his pet cat)
b) Sentence where negation is expressed by negative quantifiers, like nobody,
never,nothing. These negative quantifiers are determiners (no) , pronouns
(nobody,nothing) or adverbs (never,nowhere)
He saw no rose-bush in the garden; He saw nobody in the garden; He had
never visited the city
c) Emphatic negative sentences sentences where the negative constituent
appears to the left of the subject, triggering inversion.
Never before had he seen such pretty girls.
Negation in the Auxiliary
The Negative Projection
English sentential negation can show up in two different shapes: the
contracted nt or the full form not. The two formatives spell out the content of
a Negative Projection, NegP, one of the functional categories of the verb
Mary is not in the kitchen. Maria nu este in bucatarie.
Laka (1990) proposes the existence of a parameter dividing languages
according to the relative position of Negation with respect to tense:
a) Languages where Negation is above Tense (Romanian)

b) Languages where Negation is bellow Tense (English)

Nt and not
Nt is an affix of the auxiliary,incorporated into a modal or an auxiliary. Forms
such as cant, arent are pulled from the lexicon as fully inflected, and they
have to check their features during the derivation.
-

Nt is incorporated into the auxiliary (Couldnt you give me that book?)

A second property of nt is that it attaches to the highest verbal projection

of the sentence ( He couldnt have been fooling around so much)

A third final property is that there cant be two nt items in the sentence
(**He couldnt havent been so careful)

Not
-

First, It is not cliticized or affixed to auxiliary verbs

Secondly, when auxiliaries raise to C0 prast the subject , not must be left
behind (not is not a head that checks features through head-to-head
movement the way nt does)
Could you not stay at home for a change?
-Not can appear in lower positions. Show that not may be adjoined to any
of the verbal functional projections.
He could not have been fooling around so much/ He could have not been
fooling around so much/He could have been fooling around so much
-There can be two nots (He could not have not been fooling around so
much)
-the two negatives not,nt co-occur, suggesting that they occupy different
positions. (He couldnt not do his homework)
1)Nt is an affixal head that checks features with an abstract functional
category.
2)Not does not have to check features and does not have to be associated
to sentence negation; not can be adjoined to verbal,as well as to nonverbal projections.
Not everyone can swim/He came here not long ago.
SO- in negative sentences, there is a NegP whose strong [+neg] feature
must be checked. It can be checked by head-to-head movement or it can

be checked by a specifier head agreement with a negative specifier. We

may analyze not as a specifier of the NegP. The presence of not checks
the feature [+neg] of the negative head making the sentence negative.
(i.e. negation has scope above tense).Not is a functional element.
He should not have done it./Should he not have done it?/He shouldnt
have done it/Shouldnt he have done it?
-these examples show a clear difference between nt which is affected by
head to head movement, and not, which is not.If nt is a head and not is a
Spec, it is predictable that auxiliaries can skip not, but cannot skip nt.
DO-Support
-when the Inflection of the sentence only contains T/ Agr and there are not
auxiliary or modal verbs. He did not come/He didnt come
-the [+neg] feature is checked by a lexical element that is endowed with
an interpretable negative feature, either the negated auxiliary , or the
specifier not.
Emphatic assertion
-extending the analysis to other contexts where do appears. These are
questions, emphatic assertions, short answers:
a)Do you know this man?/ Of course, I DO know the truth.
-a morpheme labeled Affirmative, interpreted as emphatic assertion, a
morpheme which induces DO-Support in the same way as Negation. The
morphemes Neg and Aff are in complementary distribution.
-the emphatic assertion morpheme may be viewed as a head carrying an
abstract strong [+aff] feature, which like the [+neg] feature must be
checked by raising an appropriate auxiliary verb. Any auxiliary that checks
the [+aff] feature will be assigned emphatic intonation.
-All the verbs that may check [+neg], that is, modals, have, be, do, can
also check [+aff]:
He IS still working on the project./ You MAY stay, that is what I was told/I
DO like your shoes.
Questions
-Root questions and short answers are also typical environments for DOSupport:
Did she go?/What did she sell?/Yes,she did.

-questions are CPs, containing a question feature and a wh-feature in C0.

The question feature is strong in root questions and must be checked by
moving an auxiliary verb to C0=I0-to-C0
Did she go?
Negative quantifiers
a) Sentences with negative quantifiers are syntactically negative and
pass all the test for sentence negation.
Nobody came to the party,did they?Nobody came to the party,not even
her brother.
b) These sentences must be marked as negative by Spell-Out, because
they overtly show the behavior of negative sentences.
c) Sentences with Neg quantifiers contain a NegP, headed by a [+neg]
Polarity items
-

A negative sentence may be characterized not only by the existence of a negative word (such
as not or hardly,barely,etc.) but also by the existence of certain elements that, although not
negative in meaning, cannot appear in an affirmative context.

She didnt lift a finger to help me.

She doesnt like our chairman at all.
-these elements that can appear only in non-assertive contexts are called negative polarity items.
They are lexical items and are sensitive to the polarity of the sentence.
-Negative polarity items are sometimes paralleled by Affirmative Polarity Items, i.e. items that
can appear only in assertive contexts.
Polarity items:
Any vs. some (I havent any money./ I have some money)
At all vs. somehow/somewhat (I dont like him at all/ I somehow like him)
Yet vs. already (I havent seen him yet./I have already seen him)
Any more vs. still (I dont love you any more/I still love you)
Either vs. too (I dont like it,either./I like it,too)
Hardly ever vs. most of the times (I hardly ever eat caviar./ I eat caviar most
of the times)