they can combine with Complements and Adjuncts. This is shown in the structure below:carvethe turkeyat my houseon Christmas DayCarve is the V, or the head, the NP the turkey is the Complement, and it is closest to the head, the PP at my house is an Adjunct and the PP on Christmas Day is an Adjunct as well.The distinction between complement and adjunct helps to capture structural ambiguity in VPs, just as it does in NPs. In the following example, the PP on the boat can either be a Complement or an Adjunct:Theydecided on the boat. vs.They decided on the boat.In the first interpretation, the decision took place on the boat, whereas in the second, they decided to purchase the boat (Class notes)In addition, “the distinction V complement and adjunct explains a number of distributional phenomena, and therefore achieves better descriptive adequacy” (Class notes). For example, He played football in Liverpool is an acceptable sentence, but *He played in Liverpool football is not acceptable. This is because Complements normally precede Adjuncts.It is clear from our analysis of the VP that introducing a third intermediate phrasal category as well as bar notation accounts for better descriptive adequacy. Furthermore, we have seen that the system of phrasal analysis that applies for NPs can be extended to VPs, which shows that the system has better explanatory adequacy. It is possible to go through all the phrasal categories and show that the X-bar theory holds true for all of them, but due to the constraints on the length of this essay, I will not do so. It is important, however to state that due to crosscategorial symmetry, i.e. all phrasal categories are analysed in the same way, we are able to generalize the rules and state them in terms of the category variable X:X” (Spec);X’X’ YP;X (Attribute rule optional)X’ X’;YP (Adjunct rule optional)X’ X;YP (Complement Rule) (Haegeman, p.104)There are three ...
