[b-greek] RE: Act 7:59 (NP constituents- attributive or predicative) (to Iver)

From: Moon-Ryul Jung (moon@saint.soongsil.ac.kr)
Date: Tue Mar 27 2001 - 01:41:22 EST


[Iver]
> I am afraid I disagree that this is simply a definition of a modifier. I am
> reluctant to accept your principle because it is far from being obvious to me. A
> modifier modifies the head noun. It will give additional information about the
> head noun, but whether this information helps to determine the referent or adds
> further descriptive information should not IMO determine a syntactical analysis.
>

 In many cases it would difficult to draw the line between these two.
> >

[Moon]
True. This difficulty should not prohibit us from distinguishing
"predicate attributes" from "modifiers" in my sense.
As you also noted below, KOIMWMENOUS is better described to be an
NP(O)-Complement rather than a constituent of an NP.
Considering KOIMWMENOUS AUTOUS as an NP is a different syntactic analysis
from considering it as an NP plus its complement.
KOIMWMENOUS a complement to an NP AUTOUS.

If you want to stick to your approach, you could devise a syntactic
category that can cover both NP and NP + Complement, and stop the
syntactic analysis at the level of that category, leaving a further
analysis to pragmatics. That would be quite interesting. But without such
a syntactic
category, my syntactic analysis would have to distinquish
an NP from an NP + Complement. If you say it requires pragmatic
information,
which goes beyond the domain of syntactic analysis, I would have to agree.
Should I, however, always avoid using pragmatic information to find the
syntatic structure of a sentence?

Moon
Moon-Ryul Jung
Sogang Univ, Seoul, Korea

> > But first of all, I do not consider KOIMWMENOUS AUTOUS as an NP
> > because the following analysis comes to my mind.
> > This analysis has been long taught in English school grammar.
> > What is the problem with this analysis?
> >
> > hEUREN KOIMWMENOUS AUTOUS
> > V NP(O)-complement NP(O)
> >
> > 'he found them SLEEPING
> > NP(S) V NP(O) NP(O)-Complement
> >
> > In this analysis, NP(O)-Comp is a predicate that
> > explains NP(O), rather than a modifier of NP(O).
>
> I would not consider an NP(O)-complement a predicate, but I am willing to accept
> it as a predicate attribute. I am not sure I would call "sleeping" an NP at all.
> It is normally called a "participial adjective". If you go to the underlying
> structure, you will find a predicate in the dependent clause, as in: "he found
> them as they were sleeping."
> I suppose this is the background for calling it a predicate attribute. The
> important point is that it relates to the object and gives further information
> about the object rather than the subject and the verb/predicate.
> I agree that English grammar requires predicate attributes as in "He found Peter
> awake". Some English grammars call "awake" a "predicate adjective", others just
> an "adjective".
>
> So, I think you are right. It is probably better to call it a complement to the
> NP(O) rather than a constituent within the NP. A complement to an NP does not
> need to be an NP itself. What was my main interest, though, was that normally
> such complements follow the NP they relate to, just as adjectives and other
> modifiers tend to do, but in this particular case, it precedes, and this implies
> that the complement has greater relative focus than the pronoun it complements.
>
> Best wishes,
> Iver Larsen
> Denmark

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