LING 371 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Gerund, Syntactic Category, Nonfinite Verb
13 Feb 2017
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The issue: i asked what time it was. The verb to ask is taking an entire clause and that clause has the form of a question starting with a wh-phrase. We can call this a wh-clause or a question clause. A clause that has the meaning of a question: i asked the time. Both sentences mean more or less the same thing and both are grammatical. We can demonstrate the notion of what kinds of meanings a verb can combine with, and what kinds of syntactic categories they can combine with. The syntactic forms of the complement of this verb can change. Here we use a dp, but in sentence (a) we use a cp: i wondered what time it was, *i wondered the time. This shows that ask and wonder want to combine with question meaning, but in terms of what kinds of complements they can take, both verbs pattern differently. They do not always work the same way.
