I’m inundated by queries about my (many) published articles and (gigantically many) postings, queries that are variously self-serving, malicious, and, yes, seeking understanding. But I can’t possibly reply to everyone who has questions about things I’ve written; I pretty much confine myself to short responses to people I know well and replies to people writing theses (undergraduate honors theses, MA theses, and PhD theses), and even these must be brief, given the demands of my life.
And so a story, in which I explain some things that might be useful or illuminating to other readers. It begins with e-mail I got some time back from a purported graduate student — call them GS — in a European university — call it EU — who said they were writing a thesis on English syntax in which the notion of head within NPs and VPs plays a significant role. Our exchange as it unfolded …
— GS: I read your 1985 and 1993 articles which are, of course, extremely interesting for my subject. I have a few questions that I cannot seem to answer myself.
[The references are to: Heads (Journal of Linguistics, 1985); Heads, bases, and functors (Corbett, Fraser, & McGlashan, eds., Heads in grammatical theory, 1993)]
— AZ: This is about things I wrote roughly 35 years ago, intended as conceptual analysis rather than theory construction, so it’s not easy for me to respond now — and I get a lot of mail from cranks, trolls, and bots, but I believe you to be an actual degree candidate at EU, so I will (very briefly) try to set some things straight for your thesis work.
— GS: … In Zwicky 1985: 7, you write “in concord the same features are involved in the determining and the determined constituents, while in government different features are involved”. But in Det+N, we do not have the same features, except maybe for the pair this/these and that/those, where we could argue both the noun and the determiner take an -s or at least both the noun and the determiner take a mark of the plural. But what about many or the which combine with plural nouns? Even if we only consider this/these, that/those, then, we need different features for government, and we could argue again here that these or those have the same feature as the plural noun with which they combine.
I ask myself the same question in NP + VP structures: you say that subject-verb agreement is the clearest example of concord, but we do not have the same features on the subject and on the verb: for example in She eats, where we have nothing on the subject, and the suffix -s on the verb. How is that not government?
— AZ: Here you misunderstand the notion of feature in my work, which you seem to take to refer to bits of forms. But in my work, features are abstract properties of expressions. A zero-plural, like moose in The moose are huge, differs in a feature value (of number, NU:PL) from the homophonous singular moose, as in The moose is huge (NU:SG). Along the same lines, the numeral determiner one has the feature value NU:SG, as does the determiner each, while the numeral determiner two and the determiner every have the feature value NU:PL. Even though none of these determiners has a morphological expression of the number features (as this/that and these/those do)
— GS: My second question concerns the label of the constructions you studied for your 1985 article. How do you name Aux + VP? You state that the auxiliary is the head because it is the morphosyntactic locus, and you say that the category of a construct and the category of its head should be identical (1985: 1) so should it be called ‘Auxiliary Phrase’? Or can we call it ‘Verb Phrase’ since an auxiliary is a verb? Or is it a case where category determinant and morphosyntactic locus do not coincide?
— AZ: Auxiliaries are a subtype of verb, so Aux + VP is a VP with the constituents V + VP. See the development of these ideas in, e.g., the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
I hope these brief comments will be helpful to you.
After some considerable time, a recent note from GS:
Sorry to hear that you receive a lot of mail from trolls and bots.
I am extremely thankful for your input. It was helpful.
So apparently my work here is done. Not everyone takes well to the directness of my critiques; understandably, everybody just hates to be told they’re confused or mistaken in their beliefs.
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