Ley de Prácticas Corruptas en el Extranjero

A noun phrase must have a noun as its head (otherwise it wouldn’t be a noun phrase, would it?), though of course it may consist of just a pro-noun. If a noun phrase contains just one noun, then that must be the head. However, given that a noun phrase may contain other nominal ele-ments as (part of) noun phrase internal modifiers, a noun phrase can con-tain more than one noun. How do we decide which of the nouns is the real head? Let’s look at the subject of the following sentence:

The giant leap for mankind was a fake.

The underlined string is clearly a noun phrase since we could say It was a fake. It contains three nouns: giant, leap and mankind. We can use the tests from pp. 47–9 to show that they are indeed nouns. Two of them have plural forms: giants and leaps and can form a noun phrase with a: a giant and a leap; all of them can occur on their own with a possessive ’s: giant’s, leap’s and mankind’s. (Remember that the possessive ’s with nouns which are not living can sound a bit odd out of context, but is still grammatical:

this leap’s importance only became clear a few decades later.) So, we have one noun phrase and three nouns – which one is the head around which the noun phrase is built? For once, it is actually quite OK to be intuitive. Ask

169 yourself the question What kinds of things are we talking about? There are only a handful of noun phrases for which this does not work (see exercise 4). A giant leap for mankind is clearly a kind of leap, rather than a kind of giant or a kind of mankind. Hence leap is the head of this noun phrase. As always, there is also a more formal way of checking that we are right. For a subject, it is the number (as in singular or plural) of the head noun which decides the agreement on the verb (but it has to be a present tense verb or be): if the head noun is singular, the verb occurs in its third person singu-lar present tense -s form. If the head noun is plural, the verb occurs in the form lacking -s. So, make the noun phrase you are looking at the subject of a present tense sentence and change the number of the noun you suspect of being the head. If this means you have to change the verb form, then you were right. In the example above, the NP is already the subject of an appropriate sentence; so all we need to do is to change the number of leap and see whether the verb form needs to change:

The giant leap for mankind was a fake.

The giant leaps for mankind were a fake.

Hey presto, we have shown beyond all reasonable doubt that leap is the head of the giant leap for mankind.

Now that we know how to spot the noun phrase and how to decide which noun heads it we are ready to look at the other parts of the noun phrase.

7.3  Determiners

The head noun is an obligatory part of a noun phrase (except when it con-sists of just a pronoun), but at least for some noun phrases there are also other obligatory parts. Consider the following underlined noun phrase:

Rene has now put all his findings into a book entitled Nasa Mooned America.

The head noun is clearly book, but what else is obligatory? We can certainly delete what follows book and still have a grammatical sentence:

Rene has now put all his findings into a book.

How about a – can that be deleted?

*Rene has now put all his findings into book entitled Nasa Mooned America.

No, it would appear that a is obligatory too. Little function words like a which allow nouns that couldn’t function as full noun phrases on their own to do so are called DETERMINERS. As with other function words, there are a limited number of them and we will soon go through them all. First we’ll look at the obligatory parts of some other noun phrases:

The photographs and the film footage are the only proof that the Eagle ever landed.

We have underlined two of the noun phrases in this sentence (the two are co-ordinated to form one NP), and it turns out that in both cases we can

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strip the noun phrase down to just the noun and still end up with a gram-matical sentence:

Photographs and footage are the only proof that the Eagle ever landed.

Why is this possible with photographs and footage but not with book? The answer is that a determiner is only obligatory with singular count nouns.

Plural count nouns like photographs and non-count nouns like footage do not need determiners. However, they can all be used with determiners if they are needed to convey the meaning the speaker or writer wants to convey.

This is, then, the first step towards defining determiner: those little func-tion words that allow a singular count noun to funcfunc-tion as a full noun phrase. Returning to the giant leap for mankind, we see that it is not just the which can do this job:

A That

His leap was a fake Which





Another characteristic of determiners is that we can only have one of them. If you try to combine the elements you get ungrammaticality. Still, there is no reason why *that his leap or *his no leap shouldn’t be possi-ble – after all, there are noun phrases like that leap of his and none of his leaps. This turns out to be an important characteristic, since there are some determiners that can only occur with plural or non-count nouns, and since these can be full noun phrases anyway we wouldn’t be able to tell them apart from things that aren’t determiners. However, we know that things like the, those and his are determiners, and they can occur with plural nouns as well. Given that determiners (like other function words) are unique to their phrase, if an element can co-occur with one of the clear determiners, then it cannot itself be a determiner. A further property of determiners is that they really do not like to be modified. You cannot stick a very or a so in front of them.

Let’s look now at one of the noun phrases occurring in the text and a slightly modified one:

NASA won’t respond to any claims.

NASA won’t respond to many claims.

How could we know whether any and many are determiners, since claims, being a plural noun, could occur on its own anyway? Well, we know that the, those and his are determiners and we have said that each head noun can only occur with one determiner; so we just need to check whether any or many can co-occur with them. We find that many can occur with all of them: the many claims, those many claims and his many claims. We can con-clude, then, that many isn’t a determiner. It is trickier with any: *any those claims, *the any claims and *any his claims. It is not a question of meaning, since we have any of those claims and any of his claims. Why not have *any

171 those claims like we have all of those claims as well as all those claims? The reason is that any is a determiner and therefore cannot combine directly with another determiner; all is not a determiner and hence it can combine with a determiner. As expected, many – which is not a determiner – can be modified: very many or so many. Any, on the other hand – which is a deter-miner – cannot be modified: *very any and *so any.

It should be pointed out here that many introductory textbooks are much less strict on what counts as a determiner. In many of them many will be considered a determiner. It seems clear to us that many is in fact quite a typical adjective. Apart from accepting very as a modifier, it even has the comparative and superlative forms which we said (p. 60) were characteris-tic of adjectives: many–more–most. As we have said so many times through-out this book, if there is a set of words which behave in a similar way as far as form and distribution are concerned, then clearly the grammar of that language ‘thinks’ of those words as belonging to one category. Just because words are similar in meaning, i.e. in semantics, it doesn’t mean that the grammar thinks of them as the same kind of animal.

Given our strict definition, what are the determiners? Well, just to give a clearer picture, they are commonly divided into five groups according to their meaning (but as far as the syntax is concerned they are all determin-ers): ARTICLES, DEMONSTRATIVES, WH-DETERMINERS, qUANTIFICATIONAL DETERMIN-ERS and POSSESSIVES. The articles are the plain determiners in that they just make a three-way distinction between basic uses of noun phrases, DEFINITE,

INDEFINITE and GENERIC. You use a definite noun phrase when you expect the hearer to know what it is you are referring to. So if we use a definite noun phrase like the man as in the man wrote a book about the Apollo moon landings and we haven’t mentioned the man before, nor is it obvious from our shared knowledge of the world who we mean, then you are entitled to ask something like Who are you on about? The use of the with Apollo moon landings, on the other hand, is acceptable, since we can probably count on our hearer having knowledge of the Apollo moon landings. If we use an indefinite noun phrase, on the other hand, there is no such assumption that the hearer knows the thing we’re referring to. If we say a man wrote a book about the Apollo moon landings, we indicate that either we expect you not to know the man, or we don’t mind much if you do or not. A common way of introducing something is with a There is/are … and this is then an environment where we normally only get indefinite noun phrases.

Often something unknown is introduced into the discourse with an indefinite noun phrase, and then once it is established, it can be referred to with a definite noun phrase. An example is found in the following slightly modified part of the article:

But Rene has now put all his findings into a startling book entitled NASA Mooned America. Published by himself the book is being sold by mail order.

The author is not assuming that we have heard of the book and hence refers to it as a … book …, but when it is mentioned again we are familiar with its existence and hence the definite form the book is used.

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Generic noun phrases, finally, are used when speakers want to refer to all instances of the kind they are is referring to:

High pressure oxygen is exceedingly explosive.

This means that all high pressure oxygen is explosive – it’s just in its nature.

Which particular determiner is used to achieve which meaning depends on which kind of noun it is used with (all examples here are invented):

Definite: singular count noun: the book that we bought yesterday plural count noun: the books that we bought yesterday non-count noun: the oxygen that we bought yesterday Indefinite: singular count noun: there is a book on the table

plural count noun: there are ∆ books/some books on the table

non-count noun: there is ∆ oxygen/some oxygen in the tank

Generic: singular count noun: he knows a lot about the history of the book and printing in general

a book makes a good Christmas present

plural count noun: ∆ books make good Christmas presents non-count noun: ∆ oxygen can be dangerous

We have underlined the article in these sentences. The some which is used as an indefinite determiner is unstressed some (contrast this with stressed some as in I only ate some cake, not all of it!). For indefinite and generic plural and non-count nouns we have inserted a zero symbol, ∆. To our mind zeroes and gaps are used far too much in syntactic analyses these days, but this is one place where we actually think it may be defensible, because the fact that there is nothing there actually means something – the fact that the speaker doesn’t use the means that the noun phrase is not defi-nite. It is different from, say, not using an adjective – the fact that a speaker doesn’t use small in a noun phrase doesn’t mean that he thinks the thing referred to by the noun in question is big. He may just not have anything to say about the size. If you don’t like this argument, then just think of it as an absence of an article, rather than the presence of a zero article. We will, however, use the zero article from now on. One of our former colleagues in Manchester, Alan Cruse, has the following example of ‘meaningful noth-ingness’. You have agreed with a friend that unless she phones you before six o’clock you’ll meet up in the Hog’s Head for a drink at eight. Now, if your phone does not ring before six, that is a meaningful nothingness, i.e. we would be prepared to let a zero element into our system. If, on the other hand, you have made no such arrangement, then the fact that your phone does not ring has no such specific meaning and we would not want to represent that nothingness as a meaningful element.

Demonstratives are determiners that refer to something that is known and specific. They also indicate whether something is close to the speaker (this and these) or further away (that and those). The use of a demonstrative

173 may be accompanied by some extralinguistic activity, like pointing. In some dialects them is taking over as a demonstrative with plural nouns, as in I don’t like them new United kits. Wh-determiners indicate that the noun phrase is being the focus of a question, as in Which United kit don’t you like? or that it is part of a relative clause as in the team whose strip changes every year (see Chapter 8). quantificational determiners are words like any, no, some (and this time it is the stressed some we want) and enough, all indicating amount in some way. The possessives, finally, are the posses-sive pronouns that can function as determiners. A tricky problem is that full noun phrases with the possessive marker ’s also seem to be able to function as determiners: man’s greatest achievement and the flag’s shadow.

The problem with these phrases as determiners is that they are then the only determiners that don’t just consist of one word. It would seem that as long as you attach ’s to a noun phrase, that noun phrase can function as a determiner, no matter how complex the noun phrase is. This has in fact led people to assume that it is the ’s which acts as a determiner.

We can sum up the determiners in English:

Articles the, a, some [s@m], (∆)

Demonstratives this, that, these, those, (them)

Wh-determiners which, whose, what

quantificational determiners any, some [sm], no, enough, every, each, neither…

Possessives my, his, our, their, NP’s …