Homework and Adjoin

I talked to a few people today about Homework 2, and I realized (too late) that there are some things there that we never really talked about in person, though they were included in the most recent video (the one on theta-roles).

In particular, the homework makes use of both Merge and Adjoin when constructing trees. So, you need to watch the discussion of Adjoin. The main things to note: Both Merge and Adjoin are ways that you can create a syntactic object out of two. You use Merge when one of them needs the other. You use Adjoin only after you’ve taken care of all the Merging you need to do. When you Adjoin one thing to another, it doesn’t alter the thing you attach it to, so the label gets repeated. That is, if you had a VP and you adjoin a PP to it, this is represented by an object that is a VP, and is made of a VP and a PP. When you Merge one thing to another, it is because something needed it. So if a V needs a D and you Merge the two, then the features of the V determine the features of the combined object. So it is a V-category thing, such as a VP.

The “specifier,” “complement,” “maximal projection,” etc. notation is discussed at the end of that video/handout. But in the homework assignment, when it is asking about what nodes (points in the tree) are complements, it is asking essentially to point out phrases that were the first ones to be Merged with a head that needed them. To give away part of the answer, the pronoun that is Merged with the P in the “Step 1” I provided is one of the complements. And there’s one more in the finished tree.

Anyway, sorry about letting the homework get so close to the cutting edge of what you’d have seen. I’ll try to keep further ahead of the homework problems in future assignments.