So far, we have only discussed NP arguments. But other constituents may also be arguments: consider, for instance, (44a) and (44b):

44a The police announced the news.

44b The police announced that the pig had been stolen.

In (44a), announce is associated with two arguments, which will be assigned their thematic roles. The role AGENT is assigned to the police; THEME to the news.

In (44b) the THEME role is assigned to a subordinate clause: that the pig had been stolen. Clauses too can thus be arguments of the predicate. We return to the issue in more detail in section 5.1.

https://www.tg-me.com/English Syntax/com.English_Syntax

Given the wide diversity in the labelling of thematic roles and their definitions, it would be a difficult enterprise to fix the types of roles and their exact number. Even if we are unable to pin down the exact nature of the different roles involved, we are usually quite clear as to how many arguments a predicate requires in a given reading. Hence, instead of specifying the exact type of thematic role for each predicate, we shall often merely list the number of arguments, identifying their roles by numbers rather than by role labels.
Thus for the verb kill, we shall use the following lexical representation, unless we need to refer explicitly to the thematic label.


https://www.tg-me.com/English Syntax/com.English_Syntax

45.

The numerals 1 and 2 represent the thematic roles assigned by the verb whose labels need not concern us.

Research in this area suggests that it might not be necessary or desirable to refer to the thematic labels in the syntax, and that indeed the representation in (45) is the one we need. We do not go into that discussion here, and we refer the reader to chapter 3, section 6.3 and to the literature.


https://www.tg-me.com/English Syntax/com.English_Syntax

4 The Projection Principle

Let us sum up what we have done so far. We have seen that the lexical items which are the ultimate constituents of a sentence play an important part in its syntactic representation. Section 2 shows that the lexical category of the head of a phrase determines the category of the phrase. Second, we have seen in section 3 that the thematic structure of a predicate, encoded in the theta grid, will determine the minimal components of the sentence. This idea that lexical information to a large extent determines syntactic structure is summed up in the projection principle:

46 Projection principle
Lexical information is syntactically represented.

The projection principle will play an important role throughout this book. For a discussion of the role of the lexicon in syntax see also Stowell and Wehrli ( 1 992) and the references cited there.


https://www.tg-me.com/English Syntax/com.English_Syntax

5 The Assignment of Thematic Roles

In this section, we look at the assignment of thematic roles in the syntax. We focus on three areas: section 5.1 discusses clausal arguments; section 5.2 discusses expletive pronouns; and section 5.3 considers the difference between lexical verbs, or main verbs, and auxiliaries.


https://www.tg-me.com/English Syntax/com.English_Syntax

5.1 Clausal Arguments

We have seen that the obligatory constituents of a sentence are determined by the semantic properties of the predicates (verbs, adjectives) and we have mainly discussed examples with NP-arguments. Sentences too may be arguments of a predicate.

47a Miss Marple has announced the news.

47b Miss Marple has announced that Poirot had left.

In (47a), the verb announce takes two arguments, realized by the NPs Miss Marple and the news respectively. In (47b), the arguments are realized by an NP and by the clause [that Poirot had left] . Consider also the following examples:

48a The robbery surprised all the inhabitants of Blandings.
48b [That the pig was stolen] surprised all the inhabitants of Blandings.

49a Jeeves' decision is very unfortunate.
49b [That Jeeves should be leaving] is very unfortunate.

50a Poirot asked three questions.
50b Poirot asked [whether anyone had seen the pig].

51a Maigret believes the story about the burglary.
51b Maigret believes [that the taxi driver is lying].

52a Constance is aware of the problem.
52b Constance is aware [that the pig is in danger] .

The verb surprise takes two arguments. In (48a), both arguments are realized by NPs; in (48b), one argument is realized by a clause. Similarly, in (49a) the one argument of the adjective unfortunate is realized by an NP and in (49b) it is realized by a clause. In (50) and (51), we find further alternations between NPs and clauses as realizations of arguments. In (52), one of the arguments of the adjective aware is realized by an NP contained in a PP in (52a) and by a clause in (52b).

We conclude that the theta grid of predicates will not always specify a unique category to which a theta role can be assigned but will allow for a choice. We return to this point in section 7.1.


https://www.tg-me.com/English Syntax/com.English_Syntax

Let us consider clausal arguments a little more closely:

53a [That Galahad had left] is very surprising.

53b [For Galahad to have left] is very surprising.

54

In (53), we see that the adjective surprising takes one argument, to which it assigns a thematic role. The argument is realized by a finite clause in (53 a): the verb had is finite, it is inflected for the past tense and the clause is introduced by the complementizer that. In (53b), the argument of the main predicate is realized by a non-finite clause: have is in the infinitive and the sentence is introduced by the complementizer for. We return to the general principles of sentence structure in chapter 2.


https://www.tg-me.com/English Syntax/com.English_Syntax

Koster (1978b) argues that what looks like a clausal subject in (48b) and in (49b) is not in the subject position. Observe for instance that (48b) cannot be embedded as such.

(ia) I wonder whether the robbery surprised all the inhabitants of Blandings.

(ib) *1 wonder whether [that the pig was stolen] surprised all the inhabitants of Blandings.

(ib) can be made grammatical if we move the clausal subject to a final position and replace it by the pronoun it. As mentioned in the introduction, the pronoun it in examples such as (ic) seems to make no contribution to the semantics of the sentence. We return to this use of it in section 5.2.1.

(ic) I wonder whether it surprised all the inhabitants of Blandings [that the pig
was stolen].


Similarly, Stowell (1981) suggests that object clauses also do not occupy the same position as the object NP. Observe, for instance, that in English the object NP the situation in (iia) can, and indeed must (cf. (ib) ) precede the adverbial adjunct very carefully, while an object clause must follow it.

(iia) He explained the situation very carefully.

(iib) *He explained very carefully the situation.

(iic) *He explained that he was not going to leave very carefully.

(iid) He explained very carefully that he was not going to leave.


https://www.tg-me.com/English Syntax/com.English_Syntax

In (54a), both arguments of believe are realized by NPs. In (54b), one of the arguments of believe is realized by a finite clause. As the bracketing indicates, the corresponding argument is realized by a non-finite clause in (54c).

The bracketing in (54c) is meant to show that we consider 'the taxi driver' to form a constituent with 'to be innocent'. The justification for this analysis is essentially one of analogy. If we compare the sentences (54b) and (54c), we see that they are very similar in meaning. In (54b) the verb takes two arguments: one argument which is realized by the subject NP, and one argument which is realized by a sentence. On the basis of examples like (54a) and (54b) we deduce that the lexical entry of believe has the following theta grid:


https://www.tg-me.com/English Syntax/com.English_Syntax

55

In (54a), the arguments are saturated as in (56), where j is the index of an NP. In (54b), similarly, the saturation of the arguments can be represented as in (56), with j now seen as the index of a subordinate clause.


https://www.tg-me.com/English Syntax/com.English_Syntax

56

Given the close similarity in meaning between (54b) and (54c), the minimal assumption is that the verb believe in (54c) is the same as that in (54b) and has the same theta grid. While in (54b) the second argument is associated with a finite clause, in (54e), the second argument is associated with a nonfinite clause. The theta roles in (54c) are saturated as in (56), with j standing for the non-finite clause.

(54d) is also very close in meaning to (54b) and (54c) , so we postulate that the verb believe is unaltered and has the theta grid in (55). Given this assumption, we need to assign to (54d) a structure that allows the saturation of the argument roles 1 and 2. The bracketing in (54d) will do that adequately.


https://www.tg-me.com/English Syntax/com.English_Syntax

It is not immediately obvious how to label the structure [the taxi driver innocent]. In the traditional literature on parsing, the term 'verbless clause' is sometimes used. This term serves to indicate that we have a constituent which has a propositional meaning, i.e. the same sort of meaning as a full clausal structure has, but it lacks any verb forms. In (54d), the constituent [the taxi driver innocent] corresponds to the sentence [the taxi driver to be innocent] in (54c) . In both sentences, the NP 'the taxi driver' is the subject of the predicate expressed by the AP 'innocent'. In the Government-Binding literature, constituents such as [the taxi driver innocent] are called "small clauses".



https://www.tg-me.com/English Syntax/com.English_Syntax

Non-finite clauses and small clauses are not normally found as independent clauses: they can only be subordinate to some other main predicate.
The italicized constituents in (57) are all small clauses:

57a I consider John a real idiot.

57b The chief inspector wants Margret in his office.

57c Emsworth got Galahad in trouble.

It is evident that the small clauses are of different types. In (57a), the small clause consists of an NP John and a second NP a real idiot. The first NP acts as a subject to the second one. In (57b) and (57c), the small clause is composed of an NP and a PP, where the NP is the subject with respect to the pp predicate. That the italicized strings in (57) are constituents is supported by the fact that other material associated with the main verb of the sentence cannot occur internally to what we have called the small clause:


https://www.tg-me.com/English Syntax/com.English_Syntax

58

In (58), the degree adjunct very much, which modifies the verb want, cannot intervene between the subject and the PP predicate of the small clause.

https://www.tg-me.com/English Syntax/com.English_Syntax