Set Your Phrases to Stun

Introduction

In LanGoPod episode #5 we discussed the phrase and the related notion of word class. In linguistics, the phrase is a syntactic unit that acts as a constituent or, as Haj Ross puts it, “a chunk.” The notion of the phrase is useful to the language learner because it raises awareness of syntactic operations in the target language such as asking wh-questions and relative clause formation. 

Only Chunks Move

Recall from LanGoPod episode #4 and the blog post that goes with it, that the morpheme is the fundamental unit of meaning. Put simply, morphemes build words and words build phrases. As words can consist of one or more morphemes, so can a phrase can consist of one or more words. 

A phrase can be thought of as a word or group of words that acts as a constituent, “a chunk” which does not want to be broken up. We can test the constituency of a phrase by moving it to another place in the sentence. This is the principle of Haj’s diagnostic “Only Chunks Move” (henceforth OCM).

Table 1 illustrates the OCM test. In (1) “Liz ate the licorice-flavored pizza,” the constituent we want to test is “the licorice-flavored pizza.” In (2), we move “the licorice-flavored pizza” (a noun phrase) to the front: “The licorice-flavored pizza is what Liz ate.” The permissibility of this movement  provides evidence for the constituency of “the licorice-flavored pizza.” In (3), only a portion of the constituent is moved and the resulting (non-)sentence, “Flavored pizza is what Liz ate the licorice” is ungrammatical (denoted by the asterisk *). 

Table 1: Constituency test (OCM) test, with constituents shown in brackets.

Phrases and Lexical Category

Phrases are typically named for the lexical category of the head word in the phrase. “Lexical category” refers to the “word class” of the word, also called “part of speech.” Examples of English lexical categories include: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and preposition. (Note that each language has its own set of categories — for instance, some have postpositions rather than prepositions, and many lack the category of adjective.)

In grade school in the United States, most students are taught that a noun is a “person, place or thing,” and that a verb denotes an “action.” However, these semantic definitions do not adequately account for the word classes we find in English. Often, the syntax itself indicates which word class the element in question belongs to. Consider the word “jump” which, like many English words, can be either a verb or a noun. For example, it is a verb in the sentence “On Sundays they run in the park,” but a noun in the sentence “They had a good run in the park.” We can tell the lexical category by the position and context of the word in the sentence relative to the other words. In both of the example sentences above, “in the park” (a prepositional phrase) follows “run.” However, with the subject pronoun “they” before it, we hear “run” as a verb.  On the other hand, when “run” follows the article and an adjective “a good _”, this sets us up for a noun heading a noun phrase.

Now that we know that the phrase is named for the lexical category of the word that heads the phrase, how can we tell what the head word is? A general pattern is that the headword will be the one that the other words in the phrase depend upon. For example, you may have several adjectival phrases within a noun phrase. The noun is the head of the noun phrase and the noun phrase clearly dominates the adjectival phrases as they depend on the noun for their reference. A preposition is the head of a prepositional phrase and we can tell that the prepositional phrase dominates the noun phrase that follows it because the nouns rely upon the preposition for their relation to the verb. 

In the following section, you will see that the object noun phrase forms a constituent with the verb phrase. Our constituency test (see Table 3 later) confirms this as you can move the object noun phrase without the verb, but cannot move the verb without the object noun phrase. This asymmetry occurs because the object noun phrase is dominated by the verb phrase, and, of course, the verb phrase is headed by the verb! 

Phrases for the language learner

The notion of the phrase is useful to the language learner because it provides a framework that helps us acquire particles, affixes, and other modifiers. 

Noun phrases

Consider the English noun phrase and what can be inside of it. A simple account of the English noun phrase might be that the first element in the phrase is a determiner such as “the, a, those, this.” The second element is a noun modifier, and these are not limited to just one! Table 2 illustrates our simple account of English noun phrase structure.

Table 2: English noun phrase structure.

In different theoretical frameworks, different elements within the noun phrase can also be said to head their own phrases. For example, many modern generative syntacticians endorse the counterintuitive notion of a determiner phrase which actually dominates a noun phrase! In this view, in a phrase like “the house” it is not the noun “house” but the determiner “the” that is the syntactic head of the phrase.

If you are interested in learning more about formal syntactic structures, the LanGo Team is here for it!

Verb phrases

The verb phrase includes at least the verb and, if there is one, its complement. 

A typical verbal complement is the direct object. The object is a noun phrase that is within the verb phrase! In order to test the constituency of the verb and object, we simply need to apply Haj’s OCM diagnostic. 

Table 3 illustrates the constituency of the verb and its object. Sentence a. demonstrates a basic transitive sentence “they eat the cake.” In sentence b. the verb phrase “eat the cake” is fronted (meaning, moved to the front) and the sentence is grammatical when we add the helping verb “do.” However; in sentences c. and d. The verb is moved without the object and the sentences are not grammatical (and denoted with asterisks *). In sentence c. the auxiliary verb “do” precedes the object “the cake,” and in sentence d. “do” follows the object. This shows that the ungrammaticality of moving the verb without the object does not depend on the position of “do”. Based on the evidence in table 3, we can conclude that the verb and the object form a constituent: a chunk!

Table 3: The OCM test for verb phrases.

Besides noun phrases and verb phrases, there are in English prepositional phrases, adjectival phrases, adverbial phrases, and complementizer phrases (such as the underlined chunk in “I know that you know,” which contains within itself a complete sentence, “you know”). An exhaustive list of phrase types is beyond the scope of this blog post, but stay tuned in to our podcast as we will discuss more of these kinds of juicy linguistics topics soon!

Nouns and Verbs in Portuguese

So let’s apply what we’ve learned about the notions of lexical category and phrases with a mini Portuguese lesson. These notions are extremely useful to learners of Portuguese, as verbs and nouns express different morphological phenomena within their phrases. 

Nouns in Portuguese are preceded by articles. The articles must agree with the nouns in both number (singular/plural) and gender (masculine/feminine). Grammatical gender, such as masculine and feminine in Portuguese, is best regarded as an arbitrary way of classifying nouns (and adjectives). 

Table 4. Portugese noun phrases (article + noun; *-starred phrases are not well-formed, or “ungrammatical”).

In Table 4, the first example, o gato ‘the cat,’ the masculine article o agrees with the masculine noun gato in both gender and number and is grammatical. The ungrammatical form in next column, *a gato illustrates a disagreement in gender in which the feminine article a does not agree with the masculine noun gato. 

Like articles, adjectives in a Portuguese noun phrase must also agree with the head noun. Language learners can benefit from understanding the notion of the noun phrase because it can help them identify what harmonizes with what. 

Portuguese verbs are associated with a different set of agreement features: person and number of the subject, and tense/aspect. Table 5 illustrates the verb conjugation of Portuguese comer [ko.ˈmeh] “to eat.” Verb endings replace final -er to indicate if the subject is ‘I,’ ‘you,’ ‘s/he’ etc. and whether the verb is in present, past, or progressive tense-aspect (note: present and past are tenses, while progressive is an aspect).

Table 5: Conjugations of Portuguese verb comer “to eat”.

The notion of word classes such as noun and verb underpins the separate morphological agreement patterns associated with the different word classes. Portuguese displays agreement for singular or plural on determiners and adjectives within the boundary of the noun phrase. But the verb agreement patterns go beyond the verb phrase! For this reason, many syntacticians propose that there is a clause level phrase for the inflection of tense. A tense phrase, then, dominates both the subject noun phrase and the verb phrase, which explains why agreement expressed on the verb relies on features that are not contained within the verb phrase.

The verb phrase consists of the verb and its complement or complements; however in Portuguese, as we see from the data in Table 5, the verb agrees with the person and number of the subject, and with the tense-aspect of the entire utterance! What does this tell us? You guessed it, the entire sentence is also a “chunk.” 

That the sentence forms a constituent is clear from our OCM diagnostic test. For example, entire sentences can be relativized or reported, for example the sentence “I like [ the puppy who ate the pizza ]” contains the clause “who ate the pizza” which is inflected for past tense even though the main clause “I like the puppy” is in present tense! The “inner” clause is as though trapped in a syntactic bubble impervious to the effects of tense in the larger sentence.

Observations like these motivate us to propose a sentence-level constituent which is inflected for tense or aspect. As mentioned earlier, this sentence-level chunk is often called an “inflection phrase” or “tense phrase” in formal syntax. While it takes some effort to understand the notion of the phrase and how the different types of phrases fit together, there is a huge pay off for language learners as they grapple with mastering grammatical forms, such as agreement, in their target language.