New answers tagged syntax
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As indirectly acknowledged in the question, an adjective that precedes the noun it modifies generally cannot itself take a post-dependent (i.e. a dependent that follows its head), which means if it DOES take a post-dependent, it should follow the noun instead, e.g.
(1) *the fluffy in the center bread
(2) the bread fluffy in the center
(3) *the proud of his ...
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There are a few concepts being conflated here. C-Command is a tree-geometric relationship that describes two nodes relation to each other. @Draconis is correct in the sense that C-Command (specifically asymmetric c-command) is necessary but not sufficient condition for binding. The examples s/he offers however are incorrect (In all cases the subject is c-...
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In its most basic incarnation, binding is a combination of c-commanding and coreference.
In other words, in a sentence like Sam talked to herself, Sam c-commands herself and is co-referential to it (the two phrases refer to the same person). Therefore Sam binds herself.
But in Sam talked to him they don't co-reference, and in Alex talked to Sam, and James ...
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The next two trees are taken from the article in Wikipedia on discontinuities in syntax.
The parse on the left is a phrase structure analysis. The parse on the right is a dependency structure analysis. Both parses show a projectivity violation (= a discontinuity), as there are crossing lines. According to the numbers cited in the question, this sentence is ...
2
This tree(8a) shown is a mistake. The author did it on purpose to show that we can't draw like that, I suppose.
8a shows that "arrive" has two dependency, one is "Fred" and the other is "Tom". However, the correct thing to do is that "arrive" has just one dependency and it is "Fred and Tom" as a whole.
Then ...
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Short answer
'[I]n the many places where I was guilty of the reprehensible and shockingly common confusion of the notions of "adverb" and "adverbial"; these defects, for which I hang my head in shame, I have corrected wherever I have found them.'
McCawley The Syntactic Phenomena of English, 2nd Ed,(p. xii)
In the quote above, McCawley ...
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While a constituent is any proper subpart of a sentence (a morpheme, a word, a phrase, or even a clause), a phrase is typically a sequence of words built around a word class (the head) and existing as a unit of structure and function in a sentence. A constituent may or may not be a phrase, but a phrase, if it indeed is a phrase, is always a constituent. Here,...
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I do not think there is a Chinese translation of Tesnière's oeuvre. I recall a few years ago -- in about 2015 -- that there was someone who was planning to produce a Chinese translation, but I was skeptical that the effort would ever amount to much. The problem at the time was that the person was planning to translate from the English version to Chinese, and ...
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according to the merriam webster dictionary the prejacent is "an antecedent proposition in logic from which another is developed"
In a sentence with 'only', like "only roses are red" the prejacent is the proposition without 'only', namely "roses are red".
This use of preajacent is compatible with the general definition, in that ...
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The proposition that a semantic operator combines with. Like "it's raining" in the sentence "It must be raining".
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This gets into the issue of phrasal verbs.
Sometimes in English, a verb connected to a preposition will act like, well, just a verb connected to a preposition. The preposition will dominate some other phrase, as prepositions normally do:
She lived in that apartment.
She lived, back in 2010, in that apartment.
It was in that apartment that she lived.
...
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A constituent is subphrasal (lit. ‘below the phrase’) if it alone does not qualify as a phrase. Consider a noun phrase such as the house. Together the two words the and house form a phrase and hence the two together create a phrasal constituent. Each of the two words alone, however, does not qualify as a phrase and is hence a subphrasal constituent.
We can ...
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It is a matter of linguistic pragmatics. A typical statement has a topic, also known as theme or given (what is being talked about) and a comment or rheme (the new information about the topic). In 1843 Weil noticed the tendency of actual language used to reflect a topic - comment word order (what he called 'the march of ideas'); this is especially true when ...
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