Syntactic function vadV.postN{SUBJ}:adS
a verb preceding and modifying a verbal expression, this whole phrase preceding and modifying a sentence
This category illustrates well the general problem created by the traditionalist acceptance of the notion of a sentence as a syntactic category. (See GRAMMATICAL SURVEY) Our grammatical description would be greatly simplified if the sentence could be recognised as a verb phrase in which the subject happens to be specified along with other arguments like objects. There is, of course, a distinct advantage in distinguishing the position of a word before the main verb and before the subject of a sentence. The position after the subject could be categorised as "XadV.postN" to capture this special feature. Until now I have preferred to be traditionalist on this matter, at the cost of much meaningless categorial duplication. One's patience is wearing thin.
Usage
- Lexical entries:
- Found 112 attributions