LINGUIST 1AA3 Chapter 5: Week 4 - Online Module Notes

• School: McMaster University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LINGUIST 1AA3
• Professor: Magda Stroinska

Document Summary

Modal auxiliaries always take i head position. I head always takes a vp as its complement specifier of ip has special role: will almost always be occupied by noun phrase (aka subject) Sam is subject; this subject noun phrase only has a head and it goes in specifier position; sister of i" and daughter of ip (making it a subject) so it goes there. Or tense feature [-past] or [+past] if sentence has no modal auxiliary, i head will be occupied by morpho-syntactic tense feature in english only 2 tense features [-past] & [+past] V loves ham loves = present tense thus [-past] feature put in brackets to indicate its presence in mental grammar but not pronounced. [-past] so verb in vp complement is in correct form. Week 4 online module: 3b subcategories: words grouped together in same category based on their behaviour, ungrammatical: not just a matter of words not making sense.