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I have a question about this tree diagram in The Cambridge Grammar of The English Language (by Huddleston and Pullum):

enter image description here

Please see the tree diagram in the red box of the nominal preposterous salary from Lloyds. (In CGEL, a nominal corresponds to N' in the X bar theory, and is written in the tree diagram as 'Nom'.)

Question

In [11], why does preposterous salary form the first nominal and then combine with the complement from Lloyds to form the second nominal (the higher one in the tree)? Shouldn't salary from Lloyds form a first nominal and then combine with preposterous to form a second one?

For comparison, here's another tree diagram in CGEL: enter image description here In [5a], old man forms a nominal as does preposterous salary, but unlike in [11], there's no complement of man.

Here's another diagram in CGEL: enter image description here Here, the nominal careful analysis of the issues contains the same tree structure not as [5a] but as [11]. And I think that's because the noun analysis is followed by the complement of the issues. Hence the question.

JK2
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    I'd consider "from Lloyds" to be an adjunct, not a complement/argument. – curiousdannii Feb 06 '20 at 04:49
  • @curiousdannii Come to think of it, I also wonder why CGEL calls it a complement. Might this be a typo or even an error on the part of CGEL? This is not listed as such here: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/cgelerrata.html – JK2 Feb 06 '20 at 05:05
  • I'm not really familiar with their syntax tree model, but it does say "Head: Nom" for that phrase, so doesn't that mean it does form a nominal? – curiousdannii Feb 06 '20 at 05:41
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    @curiousdannii "Head: Nom" corresponds to N' in the X-bar tree. There are two things about CGEL's tree. 1. They have "Head: N --- salary" instead of "Head: Nom --- Head: N --- salary", for simplicity. 2. They use the term Mod (modifier) instead of adjunct. So the question boils down to why from Lloyds is a sister to "Head: Nom" and a daughter to "Head: Nom" when it's complement. But if it really is an adjunct as you say, this is merely using the wrong notation 'Comp: PP' instead of using 'Mod: PP' (meaning 'adjunct') at the top of the triangle over from Lloyds, I guess. Am I right? – JK2 Feb 06 '20 at 06:20
  • Try replacing "salary from Lloyds" with the indefinite pronoun "one", to see whether it is a constituent. Only constituents can be antecedents. – Greg Lee Feb 06 '20 at 20:45
  • @GregLee I have no problem with even all the preposterous one that Bill gets, do you? – JK2 Feb 07 '20 at 01:11
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    If you mean that the antecedent of "one" may be "salary from Lloyds", then no, I don't have a problem with that. And that was my point. The CGEL structure is mistaken, since "from Lloyds" is actually a complement of "salary", not "preposterous salary". – Greg Lee Feb 07 '20 at 04:15
  • @GregLee So you disagree with curiousdannii that the PP is adjunct? – JK2 Feb 07 '20 at 06:31
  • @JK2 I have no opinion about whether the PP is a complement or an adjunct. I called it a complement just out of deference to the CGEL treatment. – Greg Lee Feb 07 '20 at 08:42
  • @JK2 I've cracked it, thanks to John Payne. He tells me that the choice of preposition "from" was determined by the head noun "salary". It could not, for example, naturally be replaced in this context by "of", "out of", etc. For this reason the PP "from Lloyds" was deemed to be a complement, not a modifier. Thus the original is in fact correct. – BillJ Aug 25 '22 at 12:10
  • @BillJ Silly us, looking like traditional grammarians at the noun dependent instead of the Head preposition! However, I still find it incredibly odd to have a noun with a Complement that does not occur within its own immediate phrase! Does it not seem odd to you? – Araucaria - him Aug 25 '22 at 16:18
  • @Araucaria-him Somehow, I didn't get any notification of the recent comments...until your last comment. Just like you said in your last comment, I believe that what BillJ said John Payne said, if anything, would only make my original question the more relevant, rather than solve it. That is, the red box of tree diagram [11] should be just like that of [52a]. – JK2 Aug 25 '22 at 23:11
  • [from Lloyds] is most likely a complement of [salary] - agnostic on this so far - but the tree structure in CGEL is wrong. If it's [the [NP preposterous salary][PP from Lloyds]], how would you analyze e.g. the absolutely preposterous salary from Lloyds or the absolutely preposterous 300k salary from Lloyds? – Alex B. Aug 26 '22 at 01:40
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    @AlexB. I agree with you. And most likely, so would Araucaria. It's not clear from what BillJ said, whether John Payne did confirm that the tree diagram is correct. – JK2 Aug 26 '22 at 02:10
  • @BillJ What do you exactly mean "the original is in fact correct"? Do you mean that the original tree diagram is correct? If so, is that something John Payne himself confirmed? Is it your own opinion? – JK2 Aug 26 '22 at 02:20

1 Answers1

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I've always wondered about this tree too. In particular, I wondered why from Lloyds would be a complement. And so I asked Geoff Pullum, who replied that he thinks that salary doesn't take complements. In other words, it's a mistake.

Brett Reynolds
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    Thanks for sharing that. I appreciate it. – JK2 Dec 29 '21 at 00:50
  • I'm not sure it is a mistake. Re 52: "Analysis" selects (licenses) an of PP, and thus "of the issued" is a complement of "analysis". Re 11: On the other hand, "salary" does not select "from", and thus the PP "from Lloyds" is a complement in (and thus part of) the nominal "preposterous salary from Lloyds". PPs like this are complements, not modifiers, the latter typically consisting of those PPs with a locative ot temporal meaning. – BillJ Dec 30 '21 at 10:13
  • The important point I was making in my last comment is that from PPs function as complements, not modifiers, so I think GKP is mistaken. – BillJ Dec 30 '21 at 21:00
  • @BillJ Complements are licensed by the head of the phrase, so from PPs may be either modifiers or complements, depending on the head. Arrival, for instances takes a from PP complement (e.g., their arrival from Bethlehem), while coffee (e.g., that coffee from yesterday) doesn't. – Brett Reynolds Feb 01 '22 at 00:27
  • That's a good thought, but if you start assigning functions to constituents based on the function of an anaphorically related gap, you're quickly going to run into all sorts of problem. For instance it would make BillJ in BillJ is the user I met online an object, which simply won't do. – Brett Reynolds Feb 02 '22 at 12:04
  • Does Geoff Pullum still believe that there is any meaningful distinction to be made between complements and modifiers when it comes to the of-PPs which occur after nouns within nominals? – Araucaria - him Apr 19 '22 at 23:20
  • Sorry, that wasn't very clear. I was muddying the water by talking about of-PPs there. What I was trying to ask was whether Geoff feels there is really any difference in cases like salary from Lloyds between complements and adjuncts? The reason I ask is because of this, in particular section 4.0 (p.805) : Anaphoric one and its implications. Here Geoff et al seem to suggest there isn't any principled syntactic distinction to be made. (That is if I understood the paper and that section correctly, of course!). – Araucaria - him Apr 26 '22 at 12:38
  • @BrettReynolds Looking at this again. I wonder if we could say it's a complement because "from Lloyds" tells us the source of the salary (the giver) and source PPs can be complements: see CGEL p260 'Possession'. Also, "from Lloyds" is a preposed element: the basic order would be "the preposterous salary [that Bill gets from Lloyds]", where "preposterous salary" is direct object and the PP "from Lloyds" is complement of "get", which licenses it. – BillJ Aug 19 '22 at 12:13
  • @BillJ "Bill gets his salary from Lloyds from Lloyds, of course." --> seems to show that the from Lloyds is dependent of salary, not gets in the original example, I think. – Araucaria - him Aug 19 '22 at 14:50
  • I'm 99.9% certain that RDH intended it to be labelled as a complement not a modifier .I can't believe he'd make such a error. Unfortunately, we cannot ask him now. – BillJ Aug 20 '22 at 07:04
  • @BillJ Yes, may be. [Btw, I think in a book that big, there's going to be the very odd error about. There's thousands of examples analysed, so even taking a 99.9% confidence rate that would amount to a few errors here and there!] – Araucaria - him Aug 20 '22 at 07:41
  • We could say that in the r/c, "proposterous salary" is direct object of "gets" and "from Lloyds" is complement of "gets", not modifier of "salary". A source complement, per CGEL. – BillJ Aug 20 '22 at 07:53
  • @BillJ I don't think we could. Two reasons: first, it would be a much bigger error in terms of the tree diagram that the minor putative original one (as it should be in the relative clause branch of the tree). Second: while clause adjuncts can be preposed to the position before the subordinator, the same is not true of the complements of verbs. *The man from the fridge that took the beer, for example. – Araucaria - him Aug 20 '22 at 08:20
  • @BillJ I think a third view is that this is one of these situations where the parsing is ambiguous (i.e. it could be either [preposterous] [salary from Lloyds] or, alternatively [preposterous salary] [from Lloyds] - where I've simplified the bracketing a lot.) and it makes virtually no discernible difference to the meaning. – Araucaria - him Aug 20 '22 at 08:28
  • @BillJ Maybe a better example would be *The man from Lloyds that gets his salary. What do you think? – Araucaria - him Aug 20 '22 at 08:34
  • Complement preposing is possible, e.g. "Most of it she had written herself" / "I said I'd pay for it and pay for it I will". – BillJ Aug 20 '22 at 16:32
  • You said "the same is not true of the complements of verbs". Never mind, this is getting silly. I'm sticking to my claim (and RDH's) that "from Lloyds" is a complement. – BillJ Aug 20 '22 at 16:55
  • @BillJ Well, I said "while clause adjuncts can be preposed to the position before the subordinator, the same is not true of the complements of verbs."! I'm not necessarily averse to the given analysis, apart from that I'm not sure it's even possible in RDH's CGEL grammar for the head noun in a nominal to have a modifier it's immediate phrase and then to take another phrase within the nominal as a complement. That seems extremely odd. – Araucaria - him Aug 20 '22 at 17:06
  • @BillJ I think it's an editing error. RDH/someone originally went for [MODIFIER/adj: preposterous [HEAD/nom: salary from Lloyds]] and wanted to change it to [HEAD/nom: preposterous salary [MODIFIER/preposition phrase: from Lloyds]] but the Complement label didn't get changed. The two intended original alternatives would both be fine, of course. – Araucaria - him Aug 20 '22 at 17:12
  • @BillJ Should read "modifier in its immediate phrase", sorry. – Araucaria - him Aug 20 '22 at 17:20
  • I've cracked it, thanks to John Payne. He tells me that the choice of preposition "from" was determined by the head noun "salary". It could not, for example, naturally be replaced in this context by "of", "out of", etc. For this reason the PP "from Lloyds" was deemed to be a complement, not a modifier. – BillJ Aug 25 '22 at 11:30
  • @BillJ Thanks for confirming that with John Payne. I wonder if GPK would agree, though. – JK2 Aug 25 '22 at 23:04
  • @BillJ Also, see my comment to Araucaria above. – JK2 Aug 25 '22 at 23:14