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Verbless clause
Verbless clauses are comprised, semantically, of a predicand, expressed or not, and a verbless predicate. For example, the underlined string in [With the children so sick,] we've been at home a lot means the same thing as the clause the children are so sick. It attributes the predicate "so sick" to the predicand "the children". In most contexts, *the children so sick would be ungrammatical.
In the early days of generative grammar, new conceptions of the clause were emerging. Paul Postal and Noam Chomsky argued that every verb phrase had a subject, even if none was expressed, (though Joan Bresnan and Michael Brame disagreed). As a result, every VP was thought to head a clause.
The idea of verbless clauses was perhaps introduced by James McCawley in the early 1980s with examples like the underlined part of with John in jail... meaning "John is in jail".
In Modern English, verbless clauses are common as the complement of with or without.
Other prepositions such as although, once, when, and while also take verbless clause complements, such as Although no longer a student, she still dreamed of the school, in which the predicand corresponds to the subject of the main clause, she. Supplements, too can be verbless clauses, as in Many people came, some of them children or Break over, they returned to work.
Neither A comprehensive grammar of the English language norThe Cambridge grammar of the English language offer any speculations about the structure(s) of such clauses. The latter says, without hedging, "the head of a clause (the predicate) is realised by a VP." It's not clear how such a statement could be compatible with the existence of verbless clauses.
Ascriptive clauses consist of a subject noun and nominalised adjective.
ankaj
Hub AI
Verbless clause AI simulator
(@Verbless clause_simulator)
Verbless clause
Verbless clauses are comprised, semantically, of a predicand, expressed or not, and a verbless predicate. For example, the underlined string in [With the children so sick,] we've been at home a lot means the same thing as the clause the children are so sick. It attributes the predicate "so sick" to the predicand "the children". In most contexts, *the children so sick would be ungrammatical.
In the early days of generative grammar, new conceptions of the clause were emerging. Paul Postal and Noam Chomsky argued that every verb phrase had a subject, even if none was expressed, (though Joan Bresnan and Michael Brame disagreed). As a result, every VP was thought to head a clause.
The idea of verbless clauses was perhaps introduced by James McCawley in the early 1980s with examples like the underlined part of with John in jail... meaning "John is in jail".
In Modern English, verbless clauses are common as the complement of with or without.
Other prepositions such as although, once, when, and while also take verbless clause complements, such as Although no longer a student, she still dreamed of the school, in which the predicand corresponds to the subject of the main clause, she. Supplements, too can be verbless clauses, as in Many people came, some of them children or Break over, they returned to work.
Neither A comprehensive grammar of the English language norThe Cambridge grammar of the English language offer any speculations about the structure(s) of such clauses. The latter says, without hedging, "the head of a clause (the predicate) is realised by a VP." It's not clear how such a statement could be compatible with the existence of verbless clauses.
Ascriptive clauses consist of a subject noun and nominalised adjective.
ankaj