CHAPTER OUTLINE
We have seen that words in a language are not an arbitrary set of items, but that every word belongs to a particular syntactic category, such as ‘noun’, ‘verb’, or ‘complementiser’. In this chapter, we are going to look at combinations of categories, for instance the combination of an adjective and a noun. We can make a very simple observation here about such a combination: an adjective and a noun together behave just like a noun without an adjective. In other words, the noun is more important than the adjective. Although this observation is simple, the consequences will turn out to be enormous: the most important is that phrases and sentences should be analysed as structures or, to be even more precise, hierarchies. This insight is perhaps the most fundamental in syntactic theory. This chapter will develop this idea and present the most important predictions that it makes. These predictions turn out to be correct and therefore provide strong evidence in favour of this idea.
Insight: Constituents Are Headed
As established before, nouns can be preceded by one or more adjectives. We can, for instance, say sausages and delicious sausages. In the latter case we have combined one unit, delicious, with another unit, sausages, thereby creating a third, bigger, unit: delicious sausages. The word linguists use for such units is constituent, so we will use this term from now on.
What can we say about the behaviour of the constituent containing a noun and an adjective? Would it behave like a noun, like an adjective, or like something different? In order to investigate this, let's take the constituent delicious sausages and see what grammatical properties it has. In other words, let's see in what kind of syntactic environments this constituent of two words can stand.
First, delicious sausages can be combined with another adjective, like expensive, giving us expensive delicious sausages. Second, we can put the article the in front of it: the delicious sausages. Third, we can change delicious sausages (which is plural) into a singular expression: delicious sausage. Fourth, we can have it followed by some prepositional expression, such as from Italy, as in delicious sausages from Italy.
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