[Music] [Music] we've now looked at a number of different phrases and we've looked at the test of substitution or replacement where we look to see whether a sequence of words is or is not a constituent by seeing whether we can replace it by a single word or a Pro Form like a pronoun or these words like there or here or do so for verb phrases the other test that we talked about at the beginning is not a replacement test but what we could call a displacement test in many languages you can alter the order of a sentence in order to place a different emphasis on parts of the sentence you might want to focus a part of the sentence indicate that it's new or important information or you might want to indicate that one part of the sentence is something which is already under discussion or you might want to indicate that some part of the sentence is contrasted to something that's already been mentioned in all these cases the basic meaning of the sentence hasn't changed but something about what's called its information structure is different so where the emphasis where the focus where the contrast is placed and the way many languages do this there are different ways it can be done but in some languages this is done by altering the order within the sentence and crucially for our purposes here the sequence of words that can be moved around in a sentence to achieve these effects has to be a constituent so such displacement of sequences of words is again another test for constituency now different languages differ in the kind of displacement that they do in order to achieve emphasis or contrast and so on so the particular type of movement or displacement will vary from one language to another also there are often additional constraints on what it's possible to displace in this way so what that means is if you try to take a sequence of words and move it somewhere else in the sentence if it fails that doesn't necessarily tell you that it isn't a constituent because it will really depend on what other possibilities the language has or rather what other constraints the language places on such operations however if you can move a sequence of words by such a displacement operation that's very good evidence that it is a constituent one displacement operation that English uses has been called fronting or sometimes topicalization so this is where we take a constituent and displace it to the front or the beginning of the sentence so this would be for example a case like um I've read many novels but this book I've never read so the normal order would be I've never read this book but in order to contrast it with something that's already been said I move it to the beginning of the sentence so that operation is what's called topicalization or more neutrally possibly fronting in this case it was a noun phrase that got fronted but we can front different con consents another example of a noun phrase being fronted would be if I took the sentence um she read that novel by Hemingway and I want to know is that novel by Hemingway a constituent well notice I can also say that novel by Hemingway she read it's not an an ordinary sentence out of the blue with that order because we do this in order typically to provide contrast so that would be a more natural sentence in a context in which some you're contrasting with something else but in such an environment it's a perfectly good sentence so that tells us that novel by Hemingway in the sentence she read that novel by Hemingway is indeed a constituent notice if we tried instead what about that novel so if that was a constituent in the sentence we should be able to say that novel she read by Hemingway but that doesn't seem good that's ungr radical so in that sentence the sequence of words that novel doesn't form a constituent or it appears not to form a constituent because we can't front it so that's some evidence at least that it's not a constituent so we've got the the larger one that we can move but that sequence there doesn't allow us to move it to the front of the sentence in all of these cases what we've been fronting has been a noun phrase but we can also front prepositional phrases for example so so we could have the sentence um my sister was reading in the garden and we could front the prepositional phrase in the garden so we get in the garden my sister was reading so that again is evidence that in the garden is a prepositional phrase and I said before that some prepositional phrases we don't have words that we can substitute for them so for example if I said I bought a cake for my uncle for my uncle I've claimed is a prepositional phrase but I can't replace it with then because it's not a temporal uh prepositional phrase I can't replace it with there because it's not locative so what evidence do I have that it's a constituent at all well now if we look at this displacement in the sentence I bought a cake for my uncle I could say well I was buying various presents for the different members of my family for my uncle I bought a cake so there we can see that we can can front the sequence for my uncle as a unit which suggests that then that in the sentence I bought a cake for my uncle that sequence of the preposition plus the noun phrase is indeed a constituent we've seen that you confront NPS and PPS you can front other categories as well it's not that easy to find a context in which it's natural to front an adjective phrase but it's not impossible so if you take the sentence uh it is extremely expensive we can front that in the right kind of context so we could say for example extremely expensive it is but it's pretty good value so that's a fairly natural sentence and it indicates that extremely expensive is in fact constituent in the sentence it is extremely expensive it's also possible to front verb phrases but there one of the limitations is that for some reason in English we can only front nonfinite verb phrases examples of that are things like um she said that she would leave home and leave home she will so we can say she will leave home and we can front leave home and get leave home she will or um she he thought that she had left and indeed left she had so it's possible to front a verb phrase as long as it the the part that you're fronting is nonfinite so that process of topicalization or fronting is fairly General in English and because what you're moving always has to be constituent it can be used as a test for constituency so far we've looked at replacement and displacement as test the constituency and in English there's actually also a test that combines both where you do both replacement and displacement and that is the process of asking W questions so the way we ask wh or content questions in English is we essentially replace the constituent that we want to ask about with a proor in this case a wh proor so that's like replacing it with replacing a noun phrase with a pronoun now we're replacing it with the wh version of a pronoun so we do that so for example a uh a proor for that works for some noun phrases of that animate is who so just as you'd say I saw the woman and we can replace the woman with her I saw her we've got I saw who except the other thing that we do in English as well as using the wh form we displace it so questions in English involve using such a wh form and and then displacing it to the beginning of the sentence so questions involve both of those things and that is another test for constituency so for example if you take the sentence John at a sandwich of H brat we can replace it we can say John at it we can displace it we can say um a sandwich of whole meal bread John ET even though he wasn't very hungry so those two independent as we've already seen suggest it's a constituent we can also question it so you can question that just with what so you could say what did Jon eat and the answer would be he ate a sandwich of whole meal bread or just the fragment answer which consists of only the constituent a sandwich of homo bread so in that case we're using questioning again as a test for constituency in this case of a noun phrase we can also question other types of constituents for adjective phrases we could say for example uh if we take the sentence so Miriam is incredibly tall a possible question would be what is Miriam where we've replaced the whole phrase incredibly tall with what and again moved it to the beginning of the sentence so the answer to what is Miriam could be Miriam is incredibly tall or just incredibly tall in practice or in the general speech of most speakers of English actually when we want to ask about people's properties or the properties of entities we don't usually use just what on its own we tend to ask what is something like we use this more paraphrastic question for reasons that I don't understand so there isn't such a simple relation between the declarative and the interrogative between the statement and the question as there in is in the case of noun phrases we saw that PPS that have to do with time temporal PPS and PPS that have to do with location locative PPS can be replaced by single words so for the locative cases we've got there and here and for the temporal case we've got then in questions as well we have corresponding words so for the temporal case we've got when corresponding to then and for the locative case we've got where clearly related to there and here so in just the same way if you want to know whether a sequence of words is a prepositional phrase we can try doing this kind of uh replacement plus displacement in the case of questions for example if you said um if you had the sentence she went to the city in that year and you want to know whether in that year is a prepositional phrase one way is just doing the substitution so she went to that City then the corresponding test for the questions would be to replace it with a question word and of course fronted and you'd get the question when did she go to that City and the answer be she went to that City in that year or she went or just the fragment answer in that year so that's evidence that in that year is a prepositional phrase that it can be replaced by the question word when which also moves so also for PPS we can use evidence from questions that a certain sequence is a PP if it is a locative when we can use where so for example uh that would be an example like uh she went to the city I had heard about and we want to know is the city I had heard about a phrase is it a constituent well you can say where did she go she went to the city I had heard about so that's evidence that indeed it is so for locative PPS and temporal p PPS we have these single words that can replace them in questions just as we do in declaratives for verb phrases we saw that we can replace verb phrases and we can use as a test but we don't replace them with a single word unlike the other cases instead we have the sequence do so in a similar way in questions you also can't question a verb phrase with a single word instead you end up questioning with what and do so again two words so if you have a sentence like beatric will read a thousand novels and you want to know whether read a thousand novels is a verb phrase well the corresponding question would be you try to replace that with what and do and you'd ask the question what will beatric do with the answer beatric will read a thousand novels or just read a thousand novels so there again that's evidence that that sequence is in fact a verb phrase that can be replaced with do and what [Music]