The aim of this paper is to examine what grammatical reletions are to be acknowledged for the description of the structures of English sentence and how they should be defined.
Starting with Jespersen's five grammatical relations, the author first shows that the Object, the Predicative and the Subjunct are the problems.
Accordingly, in the first section, the author makes an attempt to redefine them with help of such notions as verb subcategorization, functional argument and so forth, developed by transformational grammarians, by inferring what traditional grammarians want to get at by those relational notions from the analyses they suggest.
The second section treats the nexus, the notion Jespersen introduced. For the elements that other grammarians analyzed as Predicative are analyzed as being part of a dependent nexus, the notion of which is very much like the one of embedding in the transformational grammar.
In the third section, the author argues that there are some infinitival phrases that have to be analyzed as Predicative and so the definition proposed in the first section is modified somewhat.
The fourth section argues that some adverbials are to be analyzed asbeing outside of the nexus and therefore the notions of nexus and sentence have to be introduced into the grammar together with two relational notions, i.e., Disjunct and Dejunct, to cover two types of adverbials, the one being under the sentence and the other being under the nexus.
The final section shows by arguing that the verb
be altogether has to be analyzed as being outside of the Predicate-Phrase that what are to be analyzed as Predicative by the definition suggested in the third section should be analyzed as something like the embedded Predicate-Phrase, the notion of which Lasnik - Fiengo's VP Complement is suggestive of.
All the arguments of the five sections point to the conclusion that there needs to be seven relational notions, i. e., Nexus, Disjunct, Suject, Auxiliary, Predicate-Phrase, Predicate and Dejunct for the description of the structures of English sentences and at least two of those for the description of four such grammatical categories as VP, NP, AP and PP.
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