Here's another post from Johanna that's well worth reading.  As I told her, I pretty much gave up on theoretical syntax back in the mid 70s when I couldn't wrap existing theory around the serial verb constructions I was working on in West African languages at the time.  It's hard within any version of MIT-rooted syntactic theory to deal with sentences that have multiple verbs in a single clause with no coordination or complementation involved.

Herb


-----Original Message-----
From: Johanna Rubba [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tue 3/14/2006 3:34 PM
To: Stahlke, Herbert F.W.
Cc: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
Subject: Re: What Is This? Herb's Analysis
 
Herb,

Again I'd ask you to post this.

As to the matter of existential sentences, an alternative name for them 
is _presentative_ sentences, since their purpose is to "present" the 
existence of the subject as news. This avoids the ambiguity of using 
"existential" to name two different kinds of sentence.

I think I have a good proof for the idea that the sentence in question 
is presentative. I tried the tag-question test to find the subject of 
the sentence, but I got a presentative result:

1. Running from the back of his skull down to the front is a patch of 
white hair that opens up into his lips, isnt there?   vs.
2.  Running from the back of his skull down to the front is a patch of 
white hair that opens up into his lips, isn't it?

Although both sound bad (it's often hard to make tags for questions 
with initial phrases other than the subject), I think the first sounds 
much better, relatively speaking. Creating presentative sentences is 
one of the major uses of "there." Such sentences have "there" in the 
tag:

3. There's a fly in your soup, isn't there?

Non-presentative sentences put a pronoun in the tag that agrees with 
the subject:

4. The girl is in the school band, isn't she?

It is also clear that, even though 2 is awful, we would still interpret 
the "it" as having "a patch of white hair (etc.)" as antecedent.

Going over this discussion in my mind, along with past ones that have 
gone on a bit, with different analyses of a sentence, I can understand 
why a lot of list subscribers find such discussions more mystifying 
than helpful. There are unambiguously correct syntactic analyses of 
many sentences, esp. if you adhere to the most conventional definitions 
of terms among linguists (Ed Vavra, please don't start up again about 
the definition of "main clause"). There is only one correct syntactic 
analysis for the sentence in question. "Running from the back of his 
skull down to the front" is a preposed subject complement (predicate 
adjective in traditional terms); "a patch of white hair that opens up 
into his lips" is the subject. It would be nice if subscribers who have 
posted other syntactic analyses would acknowledge this. If they are 
using definitions and interpretations that are not in common use among 
linguists, this should be made clear; they can still prefer their own 
analysis, but at least other subscribers would understand why and how 
there can be disagreement. I think I always make a point of saying 
whether my analyses come from Cognitive Grammar, for instance.

As to drawing a tree for this sentence, you would have to start with 
the version of the sentence that does not prepose the "running" phrase:

5. A patch of white hair that opens up into his lips is running from 
the back of his skull down to the front.

Then, if one does this with a tree at all, another tree is needed for 
the "running"-initial version, and that tree would have to show the 
"movement" (I don't believe in movement, myself). Ignoring updated 
versions of generative grammar that include things like a C-node and 
INFL (or whatever the current practice is), an old-style tree would 
reflect the following phrase structure rules for the non-preposing 
sentence:

S -> NP   VP
NP = A patch of white hair that opens up into his lips
VP = is running from the back of his skull down to the front

VP ->  V   AP
V = is
AP = running from the back of his skull down to the front

The old style of tree diagramming did not use trees to show transformed 
structures. At that time, there was no X-bar syntax, no CP or C nodes, 
and no IP nodes. Even if we have those at hand, I don't think it would 
be correct to put the "running" phrase under the C node. You would also 
have to get the subject into the IP, which seems incoherent. Maybe 
someone who is better-versed in the current generative theory can tell 
us how (and whether) one can draw a tree for the preposed sentence. 
It's important to realize that (so far as I know) generative syntax has 
not abandoned the practice of starting with some kind of "underlying" 
structure and then operating on it. Maybe Optimality Theory doesn't do 
this, but I have not investigated Optimality as applied to syntax.

Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

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