Remember that head words are important because their features play a role in how the entire phrase functions within the sentence. That’s why we name the phrase after the category of its head word. One way to think of this is that the properties of the word carry over to the phrase. Looking at how this works in a tree diagram, we can think of the properties of the head word as percolating up from the individual word to the phrase. The following diagram represents this “percolation” by showing the edges between the head words and their parent nodes as arrows.[1]

At this point, you may be ready to assume that Garth’s actually is a determiner, but that conclusion leads to some unfortunate consequences. First, we would have to say that any noun could change its part of speech simply by adding the genitive inflection. In other words, the category of determiner, which we have already described as containing a small number of words that have a principally grammatical function becomes an open-ended set. Further, this slot isn’t just occupied by genitive nouns. It can be occupied by entire phrases:

In sentence (4), stone is used as a mass noun; in sentence (5) it is used as a count noun. Additionally, some nouns that are typically either mass or count can be pressed into service the other way. For example, butter is typically a mass noun, and it seems strange to say two butters, but we can use it in a count sense in a sentence like the following:

can could may might must — ought — shall should will would This s

resent-tense verb,

Present walks Past walked

(on verbs) the third person singular –s as in Anakin kills younglings, (on verbs) the preterite (and participial) -ed as in Ron kissed Hermione, (on verbs) the progressive –ing as in Han is falling into the sarlacc pit, (on verbs) the past participle –en in  the Emperor has fallen and cannot get up, (on nouns) the plural –s in vampires make the worst boyfriends, (on nouns) the possessive -‘s in that’s Luke’s hand isn’t it, (on adjectives) the comparative –er in the car is cooler than Kirk, and (on adjectives) the superlative –est in that’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen.

The sounds of a word can be broken down into phonemes, the smallest units of sound that distinguish meaning.  These basic sounds can be arranged into syllables and a metrical phonological tree can be used to simplify breaking up a syllable  (AAL Alumnae, Gussenhoven & Haike).

Semantics: Meaning. Semantics sometimes refers to meaning independent of any particular context, and is distinguished from pragmatics, or how meaning is affected by the context in which it is uttered. For the purposes of this book, we will work under the assumption that there really is no such thing as completely decontextualized meaning.

While linguists argue first and foremost for a descriptive approach, there is an argument to be made that there is a place for both description and prescription in language study. For example, when adults learn a foreign language, they typically want someone to tell them how to speak, or in other words, to prescribe a particular set of rules to follow, and expect a teacher or book to set forth those rules. But how do teachers know what rules to prescribe? At some point in time, someone had to describe the language and infer those rules. Prescription, in other words, can only occur after the language has been described, and reasonable prescription depends on adequate description.