Quote:
Originally Posted by Bmack  I was giving a question by my teacher:
In a short answer, explain how subcatergorization accounts for the ungrammaticality of the following.
*The instructor suggested the students to study.
*The customer requested for a fork
*After getting home they devoured.
My text book does not go deep in depth about sub-catergorization. However, from what I understood. These sentences are ungrammatical because they make no sense. These words can not occur together in a sentence.
I am not really grasping the meaning of C-selection/sub-categorization.If you can suggest a website that explains it in simple terms. Or point me in the right direction...that would be helpful.
Please, any help is appreciated. |
subcategorisation is the description of morphosyntactic and semantic linguistic constraints. The relation between predicates and arguments and the restriction imposed by a word upon other dependent words.
In your examples,
the predicate
REQUEST subcategorizes transitive and direct object. FOR ?
the predicate devour demands an object in direct position.THERE IS NO.
Your first example is quite interesting:
suggest+ to subcategorizes a cluster of words .
Semantically speaking, that verb restricts : students and study are highly improbable in those places ( intensional restriction):
to suggest non animate to animate. the ambiguous nature of
to is significant here too.
Subcategorisation aims at reducing syntactic ambiguity.