We’ve now looked at a number of different
phrases, and we’ve looked at the test of
substitution or replacement, where we look
to see whether a sequence of words is or is
not a constituent, by seeing whether we can
replace it by a single word or a pro-form
like a pronoun… all these words like ‘there’
or ‘here’, or “do so” for verb phrases.
The other test that we talked about at the
beginning is not a replacement test but what
we could call a displacement test. In many
languages, you can alter the order of a sentence
in order to place a different emphasis on
parts of the sentence. You might want to focus
a part of the sentence to indicate that it’s
new or important information, or you might
want to indicate that one part of the sentence
is something which is already under discussion,
or you might want to indicate that some part
of the sentence is contrasted to something
that’s already been mentioned. In all of
these cases, the basic meaning of the sentence
hasn’t changed, but something about what’s
called its information structure is different,
so where the emphasis, where the focus, where
the contrast is placed.
And the way many languages do this, there
are different ways it can be done, but in
some languages this is done by altering the
order within the sentence. And crucially for
our purposes here, the sequence of words that
can be moved around in a sentence to achieve
these effects has to be a constituent. So
such displacement of sequences of words is
again another test for constituency. Now,
different languages differ in the kind of
displacement that they do in order to achieve
emphasis or contrast and so on. So the particular
type of movement or displacement will vary
from one language to another. Also, there
are often additional constraints on what it’s
possible to displace in this way. So what
that means is, if you try to take a sequence
of words and move it somewhere else in the
sentence, if it fails, that doesn’t necessarily
tell you that it isn’t a constituent, because
it will really depend on what other possibilities
the language has, or rather what other constraints
the language places on such operations. However,
if you can move a sequence of words by such
a displacement operation, that’s very good
evidence that it is a constituent.
One displacement operation that English uses
has been called ‘fronting’ or sometimes
‘topicalisation’. So, this is where we
take a constituent and displace it to the
front or the beginning of the sentence. So
this would be, for example, a case like “I’ve
read many novels, but this book, I’ve never
read.” So the normal order would be “I’ve
never read this book”, but in order to contrast
it with something that’s already been said,
I move it to the beginning of the sentence.
So that operation is what’s called topicalisation,
or more neutrally possibly, fronting. In this
case it was a noun phrase that got fronted,
but we can front different constituents. Another
example of a noun phrase being fronted would
be if I took the sentence “She read that
novel by Hemingway.”, and I want to know
if “that novel by Hemingway” is a constituent.
Well notice I can also say “That novel by
Hemingway, she read.” It’s not an ordinary
sentence out of the blue, because we do this
in order to provide contrast, so that would
be a more natural sentence where you’re
contrasting it with something else. But in
such an environment it’s a perfectly good
sentence. So that tells us that “that novel
by Hemingway” in the sentence “She read
that novel by Hemingway” is indeed a constituent.
Notice if we tried instead, what about “that
novel”? So, if that were a constituent in
the sentence, we should be able to say “That
novel, she read by Hemingway.” But that
doesn’t seem good — that’s ungrammatical.
So in that sentence, the sequence of words
“that novel” doesn’t form a constituent,
or it appears not to form a constituent because
we can’t front it. So that’s some evidence,
at least, that it’s not a constituent. So
we’ve got the larger one that we can move,
but that sequence there doesn’t allow us
to move it to the front of the sentence.
In all of these cases, what we’ve been fronting
has been a noun phrase, but we can also front
prepositional phrases, for example. So we
could have the sentence “My sister was reading
in the garden.” And we could front the prepositional
phrase “in the garden”. So we get “In
the garden, my sister was reading.” So that
again is evidence that “in the garden”
is a prepositional phrase.
And I said before that some prepositional
phrases, we don’t have words that we can
substitute for them. So for example, if I
said “I bought a cake for my uncle”, “for
my uncle” I’ve claimed is a prepositional
phrase, but I can’t replace it with ‘then’
because it’s not a temporal prepositional,
I can’t replace it with ‘there’ because
it’s not locative. So what evidence do I
have that it’s a constituent at all? Well
now if we look at this displacement in the
sentence “I bought a cake for my uncle”,
I could say, well I was buying various presents
for the different members of my family. “For
my uncle, I bought a cake.” So there we
see that we can front the sequence “for
my uncle” as a unit, which suggests that
then that in the sentence “I bought a cake
for my uncle”, that sequence of the preposition
and then the noun phrase is indeed a constituent.
We’ve seen that you can front NPs and PPs.
You can front other categories as well. It’s
not that easy to find a context in which it’s
natural to front an adjective phrase, but
it’s not impossible. So if you take the
sentence “It is extremely expensive”,
we can front that in the right kind of context,
so we could say, for example: “Extremely
expensive it is, but it’s pretty good value.”
So that’s a fairly natural sentence, and
it indicates that “extremely expensive”
is in fact a constituent in the sentence “It
is extremely expensive.”
It’s also possible to front verb phrases,
but there one of the limitations is that for
some reason in English we can only front non-finite
verb phrases. Examples of that are things
like “She said that she would leave home,
and leave home, she will.” So we can say
“She will leave home” and we can front
“leave home” and get “leave home, she
will”. Or, “He thought that she had left
and indeed left, she had.” So it’s possible
to front a verb phrase as long as the part
that you’re fronting is non-finite. So that
process of topicalisation or fronting is fairly
general in English, and because what you’re
moving always has to be a constituent, it
can be used as a test for constituency.
So far we’ve looked at replacement and displacement
as tests for constituency, and in English
there’s actually also a test that combines
both, where you do both replacement and displacement,
and that is the process of asking wh- questions.
So the way we ask wh- or content questions
in English is we essentially replace the constituent
that we want to ask about with a pro-form,
in this case a wh- pro-form, so that’s like
replacing a noun phrase with a pronoun. Now
we’re replacing it with a wh- version of
a pronoun. So we do that, so for example a
pro-form that works for some noun phrases
if they’re animate is ‘who’, so just
as you’d say “I saw the woman”, and
we can replace “the woman” with ‘her’
(“I saw her”), we’ve got “I saw who”,
except, the other thing we do in English,
as well as using the wh- form, we displace
it.
So questions in English involve using such
a wh- form and then displacing it to the beginning
of the sentence, so questions involve both
of those things. And that is another test
for constituency. So for example, if you take
the sentence “John ate a sandwich of wholemeal
bread”, we can replace it, we can say “John
ate it”. We can displace it, we can say
“A sandwich of wholemeal bread, John ate,
even though he wasn’t very hungry.” So
those two independent tests we’ve already
seen suggest that it’s a constituent. We
could also question it, so you can question
that just with ‘what’. So you could say
“What did John eat?” and the answer would
be “He ate a sandwich of wholemeal bread”
or just the fragment answer which consists
of only the constituent, “A sandwich of
wholemeal bread.” So in that case we’re
using questioning, again as a test for constituency,
in this case of a noun phrase.
We can also question other types of constituents.
For adjective phrases, we could say, for example,
if we take the sentence “Miriam is incredibly
tall”, a possible question would be “What
is Miriam?”, where we’ve replaced the
whole phrase “incredibly tall” with ‘what’,
and again moved it to the beginning of the
sentence. So the answer to “What is Miriam?”
could be “Miriam is incredibly tall” or
just “Incredibly tall”.
In practice, or in the general speech of most
speakers of English, actually when we want
to ask about people’s properties or the
properties of entities, we don’t usually
use just ‘what’ on its own, we tend to
use what is something something ‘like’.
We use this more periphrastic question for
reasons that I don’t understand. So there
isn’t such a simple relation between the
declarative and the interrogative, between
the statement and the question, as there is
in the case of noun phrases.
We saw that PPs that have to do with time,
temporal PPs, and PPs that have to do with
location, locative PPs, can be replaced by
single words, so for the locative cases we’ve
got ‘there’ and ‘here’, and for the
temporal case we’ve got ‘then’. In questions
as well we have corresponding words, so for
the temporal case we’ve got ‘when’ corresponding
to ‘then’, and in the locative case we’ve
got ‘where’, clearly related to ‘there’
and ‘here’.
So in just the same way, if you want to know
whether a sequence of words is a prepositional
phrase, we can try doing this kind of replacement
plus displacement in teh case of questions.
For example, if you said, if you had the sentence
“She went to the city in that year” and
you want to know whether “in that year”
is a prepositional phrase, one way is to just
doing a substitution, so “She went to that
city then”. The corresponding test for the
questions would be to replace it with a question
word and then of course front it, and you’d
get the question “When did she go to that
city?” and the answer would be “She went
to that city in that year” or just the fragment
answer “In that year”, so that’s evidence
that “in that year” is a prepositional
phrase, that it can be replaced by the question
word “when” that also moves. So also for
PPs we can use evidence for questions that
a certain sequence is a PP. If it is a locative
where we can use ‘where’, so, that would
be an example like “She went to the city
I had heard about” and we want to know is
“the city I had heard about” a phrase,
is it a constituent? Well you can say “Where
did she go? She went to the city I had heard
about.” So that’s evidence that indeed
it is, so for locative PPs and temporal PPs,
we have these single words that can replace
them in questions just as we do in declaratives.
For verb phrases, we saw that we can replace
verb phrases, and we can use that as a test,
but we don’t replace them with a single
word, unlike the other cases. Instead we have
the sequence “do so”.
In a similar way, in questions, you also can’t
question a verb phrase with a single word.
Instead you end up questioning with ‘what’
and ‘do’, so again two words. So if you
have a sentence like “Beatrice will read
a thousand novels” and you want to know
whether “read a thousand novels” is a
verb phrase, well the corresponding question
would be you try to replace that with ‘what’
and ‘do’ and you’d ask the question
“What will Beatrice do?” with the answer
“Beatrice will read a thousand novels”
or just “read a thousand novels”. So there
again, that’s evidence that that sequence
is in fact a verb phrase, that it can be replaced
with ‘do’ and ‘what’.
