N-bars

The NPs in Figure 7.1 have an internal constituent generally known as ‘N-bar’ (Nˈ or N– ), which we have not yet mentioned. N-bars may consist solely of nouns or, as here, of nouns with qualifiers, excluding determiners (i.e. articles, demonstrative or possessive adjectives, or quantifiers such as many) and adjuncts. They need to be treated as sub-constituents of the NP by virtue of certain properties which they alone have. For example, in complex noun phrases, they can generally be replaced by the pro-form one, a property not lost on the writers of Friends in the 1990s. In each of these titles one can be replaced by, for example, ‘episode’, ‘Friends episode’, or even ‘weekly Friends episode’:

The One with the Sonogram at the End

The One Where Underdog Gets Away

The One After the Ski Trip

In addition to being hierarchically structured, sentences are ordered, though both the order of elements and their relative freedom of movement vary considerably between languages. Within the noun phrases, for example, we cannot place the article after the noun (*little girl the), though articles may follow nouns in Swedish, at least when they are not qualified by adjectives, e.g. flicka+ n (‘girl-the’), hus+ et (‘house-the’). The order of phrases matters, too: An apple ate the little girl means something very different from The little girl ate the apple, just as John loves Mary does not – sadly for John – mean the same as Mary loves John.

In English, the position of the subject NP before the predicate VP is fairly fixed, and if we wish to modify it we have to signal that change by intonation or by a special construction, e.g. passivization, which turns an object into the subject of a sentence, or clefting, which signals to the listener/reader that the object has been removed from its expected place:

John loves Mary.

Mary is loved by John.

It is Mary John loves.

Some languages use inversion of subject NP and VP to transform a statement into a closed (or yes/no) question, as these examples from Dutch demonstrate:

U spreekt Nederlands. You speak Dutch.

Spreekt u Nederlands? Do you speak Dutch?

Hij gaat naar de kerk. He goes to church.

Gaat hij naar de kerk? Does he go to church?

This once was the normal way to form closed questions in English, but its use in modern English is severely restricted, with only a small set of verbs known as modals, plus the auxiliaries to be, to have and to do allowing inversion:

Has the Prime Minister taken leave of her senses?

Could you lend me a pen?

Must they always practice the drums on Sundays?

For all other verbs, the auxiliary do, which does allow inversion, must be supplied, as in the glosses of the Dutch examples above. This is known as do-support.