Contituency c-command Binding Principles x-theory tp and cp

Shamsiev Okhunjon Student ID: 1973056

1. 
   Contituency
   
2. 
   C-command
   
3. 
   Binding Principles
   
4. 
   X-theory
   
5. 
   TP and CP
   

1. 
   English language has very difficult sentence structure. Sentences are also divided into some groups and constituent is a linguistic part of larger sentences, phrases or clauses. For example, all the words and phrases that consist a sentence are said to be constituents of the sentence. A constituent might be morpheme, word, phrase or clause.
   

Every sentence has constituents. Subject, predicate and other parts of speech are working together with constituents for make the sentence more meaningful.

For example, in the sentence: “My dog Rex bit the postal carrier on the ankle”.

The constituent parts are the subject, made up of a Noun Phrase (my dog Rex), and the predicate, a Verb Phrase (bit the postal carrier on the ankle).

Each of the phrases in the sentence can be further broken down into its own constituents. The subject NP includes the noun (Rex) and a possessive pronoun and noun (My dog) that modify Rex. The VP includes the verb (bit), the NP “the postal carrier” and the prepositional phrase on the ankle.

2. 
   C-command is the most important of the structural relations in the sentence structure. Although c-command takes a little getting used to, it is actually the most useful of all the relations. C-command also divided into two groups which is intuitively and more formally. For example:
   

C-command informal: A node c-commands its sisters and all the daughters (and granddaughters and great-granddaughters) of its sisters.

C-command formal: Node A c-commands node B if every node dominating A also dominates B, and either A and B dominates the other.

This is a very simple example for formal c-command.

Clearly, NP1 "Alex" is not NP2 "himself", and NP1 "Alex" does not dominate NP2 "himself", or vice versa. But every node that dominates NP1 "Alex" (namely, the S) also dominates NP2 "himself". Therefore, NP1 "Alex" C-commands NP2 "himself".

3. 
   Principles of binding is divided into three groups A, B and C.
   

Principle A deals with Anaphors. Principle B deals with Pronouns. And Principle C deals with R-expressions.

Principle A binding theory suggested that an anaphor must be bound. Principle B considered that a pronoun must be free. This principles are not final state. Let’s test them out. Principle A suggest an anaphor must be bound and principle B a pronoun must be free, free is the opposite of the bound. That means nothing bound pronoun.

For example, John hit himself. In this example has two noun phrase, the first in “John” and second in “himself”. The first NP binds second NP because they are co-index.

4. 
   One of the first information about X theory appeared in Chomsky (1970). Jackendoff’s seminal book X-bar theory is the source of many of the ideas surrounding X-bar theory. But, Radford’s “Transformational Grammar: A first course provides most complete information for X theory. An X-bar theoretic understanding of sentence structure is possible in a constituency-based grammar only; it is not possible in a dependency-based grammar. The letter X is used to signify an arbitrary lexical category; when analyzing a specific utterance, specific categories are assigned. Thus, the X may become an N for noun, a V for verb, an A for adjective, or a P for preposition. The term X-bar is derived from the notation representing this structure. Certain structures are represented by X. Because this is difficult to typeset, this is often written as X′, using the prime symbol. In English, however, this is still read as "X bar". The notation XP stands for X Phrase, and is equivalent to X-bar-bar, written X″, usually read aloud as X double bar.
   

5. 
   There can also be direct object and indirect object agreement phrases (AgrOP, AgrDOP, AgrIOP), for languages in which verbs may exhibit agreement with an object. Other types of inflection may be encapsulated in a tense phrase (TP) for grammatical tense, aspect phrase (AspP) for grammatical aspect, and so on.
   

The standard abbreviation for complementizer is C. The complementizer is often held to be the syntactic head of a full clause, which is therefore often represented by the abbreviation CP (for complementizer phrase).