Is there any general pattern here? We can easily formulate a general principle for cases 3 and 4 if we say that dependents other than determinatives combine to form nominals, whether those dependents appear before or after the head noun, and determinatives combine with nominals to form NPs.
There is talk of generalize specific patterns in the sentence structure. Is their a way to make sentences more difficult?
Mass nouns also can be either concrete (milk, wool, spaghetti, etc.) or abstract (happiness, communism, integrity). They cannot usually be made plural (*two wools), nor do they take the indefinite article (*a wool). If we want to count mass nouns, we must add a count noun to specify the quantity (two glasses of milk).
This is actually something that i have not really put much thought into. There are words that have been structures as a words that talks about not just one thing. Now with the examples here we see that they sound funny when made plural. Can their be a way to make such words sound proper in a pural form?
All the same information is here, but unfortunately, this method tends to lack visual clarity. It’s difficult to grasp the constituency of the sentence at a glance the way you can with a diagram.
How can one possibly change this diagram to have more clarity?
You can also demonstrate phrase structure if the words will move as a unit. In other words, it is often possible to recast a sentence so that it still has more or less the same meaning but so that its elements appear in a different order.
While you can put the elements are in a different structure, is it really possibly to put all type of sentences in a different structure where they would work?
Sentence 33a, which uses the simple past tense, refers in general to a completed action. Sentence 33b refers to the action as being in progress at some particular time
The differences in the words show off the actions being done. However can these both be considered full sentences?
In sentence (2), you may have been tempted to declare leaves a future-tense verb, but compare the form to our previous list. It is actually a present-tense form, although the sentence refers to a future event.
For a sentence talking about a future event, it's weird. I think this example should have been extended. It's the point that both "Leave" and "Leaves" can be used in either present or future tense depending on the context of the sentence, that makes that example weird.
By writing the verb in capital letters, we mean any of the forms of the verb. In this instance, BE includes am, are, is, was, were, be, been, and being.
You would think that "BE" would only exist in one way. However that's not the case, seeing how the word can be used in different sentence examples could be helpful here.
Unlike other types of verbs, intransitives can end sentences. Note, however, that intransitive verbs are not required to end the sentence.
What type of verb would be required in a general sentence structure?
For now we merely list the most common determiners, and some subcategories which may be familiar, including articles, demonstratives, quantifiers, and numerals. We will return to them in more detail when we look at noun phrase structure.
Determiners may play a big role in noun phrase, Why wasn't there and example of it here?
In traditional grammar, adverb was a catch-all category for everything that was difficult to analyze. Unfortunately, this had the effect of making the category heterogeneous. Some words that are traditionally called adverbs show very different distributions from other words in the same category. In some cases, we will not categorize these words as adverbs at all. We will note such cases as they occur in later chapters. We will begin, however, with the most obvious cases.
While the definition of what an adverb is makes sense, the context of when it is used in this paragraph has a bunch of contradictories that I believe could have been listed differently. The paragraph right under it could have been put right after the definition in it's space.
However, both domains must interact with each other at a certain level. On one level, the morpheme should fit a syntactic representation or a syntactic structure. And on another level, the morpheme can have its syntactic representation. That notion is called “the syntactic approach to morphology”
Here it mentions both of these big terms without an example or two. Which I think is needed with the fact that it's mentioned that "Both domains must interact with each other..."
Even though both speech and writing require the use of syntax to remain cohesive, the differences between writing and speech are clear and abundant; as Casey Cline writes, “Speech is generally more spontaneous than writing and more likely to stray from the subject under discussion.”
When talking about relating speech and writing through syntax, Could you say that both need to sound appealing?
In an ideal world, descriptive and prescriptive approaches to language would follow this harmonious relationship: linguists would describe the rules of a language, and pedagogues would use those descriptions to make textbooks to teach language learners. In the real world, however, practitioners of the two approaches often separate themselves into hostile camps.
The visual of hostile camps is an interesting one, however Couldn't there be instances where a descriptive changes or vise versa?
I find the advanced units particularly useful for two purposes: first, they give you guidance in dealing with certain difficult questions that more advanced or curious students tend to bring up.
As a concluding statement for the introduction, it does sum up what was being said. However, they talk about "advanced units" without specifying those units