Timeline for When parsing the noun phrase...which is modifying which?
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7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 5, 2015 at 2:08 | comment | added | Greg Lee | "the closest feeling to death" is a noun phrase. It is not discontinuous, but it contains both parts of the discontinuous modifier "closest to death". You can draw trees for such structures, provided you can make tree diagrams with crossing branches. In The Syntactic Phenomena of English, McCawley gives trees with crossing branches to describe discontinuous structures. I'm sorry that I can't draw such a tree for you here. | |
| Oct 5, 2015 at 2:02 | comment | added | Opaque | I thought that "closest feeling to death" is a noun phrase, and you pointed out its being discontinuous, so I thought it might be one...(a wild guess). | |
| Oct 5, 2015 at 1:51 | comment | added | Greg Lee | I don't understand what you're asking. It works like a discontinuous noun phrase in that it's discontinuous, except that it isn't a noun phrase. I suppose you might call "closest to death" an adjective phrase. | |
| Oct 5, 2015 at 1:47 | comment | added | Opaque | Thank you! So does it work like discontinous noun phrase? Or is it some other concept? | |
| Oct 5, 2015 at 1:45 | comment | added | Greg Lee | Yes, it's grammatical. (Except it needs an article at the beginning.) The discontinuity arises because after reducing the relative clause, it's possible to move the adjective "closest" to before the noun "feeling", but leaving behind the second part of the modifier, "to death". | |
| Oct 5, 2015 at 1:39 | comment | added | Opaque | It is beyond my grammatical understanding... I'm sorry, but is what you mean that I cannot parse it with branch as it uses discontinous constituent, but this sentence number 1 still makes sense and is grammatically correct? | |
| Oct 5, 2015 at 1:36 | history | answered | Greg Lee | CC BY-SA 3.0 |