Abstract
In this paper, I address the problem wherein the same English word permits one of its complement positions to be satisfied by phrases of different categories. A well-known example of such an English word is the copula to be, whose complements include adjective phrases, noun phrases, prepositional phrases and adverbial phrases. I provide a way to treat such words, in particular verbs, as single lexical items through a conservative extension of the usual treatment of word classification as a pair comprising a part of speech category and a complement list. I then show how a further conservative extension of complement lists permits a satisfactory formalization of doubly complemented English verbs which are synonymous under a permutation of their complements. These verbs include, but are not limited to, so-called double object constructions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
It is generally agreed that no word of English has more than three complements. For the sake of brevity, I have stated the cancellation rule as a schema, covering much more than is warranted by the facts of English.
The difficulties which linguists applying this distinction to English encounter have been surveyed in Schütze (1995). Many of them can be, in my view, satisfactorily addressed.
Notice that proper nouns are assigned, not members of the universe, but singleton subsets of the universe. This, in turn, requires that the usual rule for the semantic interpretation of predication be expressed in terms of the subset relation, rather than the set membership relation. This choice permits a simpler set of rules, when a broader range of phenomena is taken into consideration.
See Carpenter (1997, ch. 6.2) for a different approach.
References
Allerton, D. J. (1982). Valency and the English verb. New York, NY: Academic Press.
Bach, E. (1964). Subcategories in transformational grammars. In H. Lunt (Ed.), Proceedings of the ninth international congress of linguists (pp. 672–678). The Hague: Mouton.
Brown, K. (Ed.). (2006). Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (2nd ed.). Oxford, England: Elsevier.
Carpenter, B. (1997). Type-logical semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1970). Remarks on nominalization. In Jacobs & Rosenbaum (Eds.) 1970 pp. 184–221. Reprinted. In: Chomsky 1972 pp. 11–62.
Chomsky, N. (1972). Studies on semantics in generative grammar. The Hague, The Netherlands: Mouton.
Fillmore, C. (1965). Indirect object constructions in English and the ordering of transformations. The Hague, The Netherlands: Mouton. (Monographs on linguistic analysis: no. 1).
Gillon, B. S. (2012). Implicit complements: A dilemma for model theoretic semantics. Linguistics and Philosophy, 35(4), 313–359.
Green, G. M. (1974). Semantics and syntactic regularity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Huddleston, R. (2002). The clause: Complements. In R. Huddleston & G. K. Pullum (Eds.), The Cambridge grammar of the English language (ch. 4). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jackendoff, R. (1977). X-Bar syntax: A study of phrase structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jacobs, R. A., & Rosenbaum, P. S. (Eds.). (1970). Readings in English transformational grammar. Waltham, MA: Ginn.
Lees, R. B. (1963). The grammar of English nominalizations. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University (Publication ... of the Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics; v. 12).
Levine, R. D., & Meurers, W. D. (2006). Head-driven phrase structure grammar: Linguistic approach, formal foundations and computational realization. In Brown (Ed.) 2006.
Lyons, J. (1968). Introduction to theoretical linguistics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartik, J. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London, England: Longman.
Sag, I., Wasow, T., & Bender, E. M. (1999). Syntactic theory: A formal introduction (2nd ed.). Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information. (CSLI lecture notes: no. 152).
Schachter, P. (1962). Review of Lees 1963. International Journal of American Linguistics, 28(2), 134–145.
Schütze, C. T. (1995). PP attachment and argumenthood. MIT working papers in linguistics: v. 26 (Papers on Language Processing and Acquisition), pp. 95–151.
Acknowledgments
I thank Walter Pedersen for discussion with me of a number of points raised in this article. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC 410-2010-1254).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gillon, B.S. Complement Polyvalence and Permutation in English. J of Log Lang and Inf 23, 275–285 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10849-014-9191-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10849-014-9191-2