2) Move Wh-.
This rule moves an interrogative pronoun (“Wh- word”) to the front of the
sentence:
The cat eats
mice
.
à
What
does the cat __ eat __?
This example allows us to introduce the concept of
rule ordering
. The movement rules we have
just examined must apply in the following order:
1. Move Aux.
2. Move Wh-.

46
This is because if we apply Move Wh- first, and then Move Aux, we get an ungrammatical
sentence, such as:
*Does what this cat __ eat __?
Grammatical relations
In our early sentence
The dogs chased the cats through the bushes
the various constituents
participate in what linguists call
grammatical relations
. These relations are centered on the
verb, in this case
chased
.
SUBJECT
VERB
OBJECT
the dogs
chased
the cats
The subject and object are sometimes referred to as
arguments
of the verb. They are phrases
that the verb needs for it to make sense in a sentence. Note that the verb
chase
needs a subject
and object;
*the dogs chased
is not a well-formed sentence. On the other hand, we don’t really
need
through the bushes
; this is extra information and so this PP is sometimes considered an
adjunct
to the verb.
Some verbs take only one argument, the Subject.
Rip van Winkle slept
and
Rip van Winkle
slept for twenty years
are both perfectly good sentences;
for twenty years
is an adjunct
adverbial expression that adds information, but isn’t required.
On the other hand, some verbs need more than a subject. Take the sentence
Sally gave Mary a
book
. Here we have three arguments: subject (
Sally
), direct object (
a book
), and indirect object
(
Mary
). *
Sally gave Mary
doesn’t work well. *
Sally gave a book
sort of works, but only with
the caveat that there’s an implied recipient somewhere in the larger universe of discourse:
the
library? Mary?
As we saw with Latin, some languages use morphology to signal grammatical relations, while
others (like English) use mainly syntax:
Agricola
puellam
amat
farmer
girl
loves
‘the farmer loves the girl’

47
Agricolam
puella
amat
farmer
girl
loves
‘The girl loves the farmer'
Hierarchical structure
Recall that one of the Principles of Universal Grammar is Hierarchical Structure. We have
seen this in the internal structure of words, but it becomes even more obvious when thinking
about sentences. Sentences are not simply strings of words placed one after the other; rather,
they have an internal logic that is structured into
constituents
which occur at different
levels
in
a phrase structure. In other words, not this:
But this:
Note that the triangles in the last tree diagram are simplifications of the internal structure of the
subject and object. The Subject is actually a Noun Phrase or NP, which we can represent
approximately this way ("Det" stands for "Determiner" which is our new word for "Article").

48
The Predicate is actually a Verb Phrase or VP, with a verb and NP object with its own Det and
N:
Components of phrases
A
Phrase
is the maximal projection of a lexical category (Noun, Verb, Preposition, Adjective,
etc.). A phrase may contain only one word, for example the NP [cats] has only the word
"cats." In this case, [cats] is the
Head
of the phrase. Besides the Head, there other components


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