 We have looked at linguistic theory and its components and we have established how study of a structure plays a significant role in answering several theoretical questions in linguistics. We looked at very briefly how we learn a language, the role of knowledge of language and what it consists of and universal grammar, how that makes a difference, how that plays a role in similarities and differences of languages. Then we looked at components of sentences. We also looked at types of verbs, types of objects, how verbs and objects are related to one another and then if we draw a super structure then subjects are outside the predicate and then we have looked at both subjects and predicate as a component of the sentence. Now we are going to look at X bar theory in linguistics structure, how X bar theory captures sentential structure and how a phrase is built around and what is the role of a phrase in a sentence. How X bar theory helps us understand differences and similarities between several components that we have looked at. This is very easy and interesting. I want your total attention for this thing. So, please take a look at that. There are several categories in language. We are going to be talking about four of them and some of them are nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions or post positions. We come to this structure and rules underlying this structure in a minute. In order to connect with what we discussed yesterday, I want to take you through one more aspect of it which is called, we looked at verbs and we looked at nouns. Now we are going to look at how and what they carry with themselves. So, we are going to be talking about features on these elements, nouns and verbs. Certain features like tense, aspect, modality and formal distinctions, verbs carry such features. I am going to elaborate on these things in a minute, but let me first make sure, if we have heard these words at least, tense, modality, yes, no, no. What are the tenses that you have heard? Present, past, future. I am glad there are only three of them. Then we talk about aspects. Have you heard these names before? Perfect, imperfect, continuous, yes. Please give me very quickly an example of a present and sentence. Somebody from you. Simple present and sentence. Simple present and sentence. Sun rises in the east. Sun rises in the east. Very nice. Sir, next. Past tense. Any simple sentence? He went there. He went there. So, went shows past tense, if I can assume that. Future tense? I will go there. I will go there. Very nice. I am assuming that we understand why these sentences are present, past and future. We need to focus on more complicated stuff. If we talk about aspects and then say perfect aspect or imperfect aspect, you think you can give me some examples of perfect aspect and imperfect aspect? Any idea? I will need to talk about that. Then how about infinitive and non-infinitive things? I will talk about that. See, any word, something like this. This marker 2 is an infinitive marker. So, to go, to read, to sleep, to eat, all the verbs come with this infinitive marker. It is not language specific thing. It is not only about English. It happens in all the languages. Anybody in Hindi example? How do we say the same thing in Hindi? Padna. So, the na at the end of it is infinitive marker. Na in the word padna is exactly like 2 in the word to read. And the important thing about this is, it works like a wrapper. It is wrapped in a, like verbs are wrapped in this infinitive marker. And the moment we want to use it, we have to remove it and then use the verb in a sentence. So, when we say I want to read a book, we do not say I want to read a book. There are some cases where we use infinitival verbs in sentences, but most of the time when we use them and when verbs have to carry their features, that is when these features of the verb gets activated in a sentence, then we have to remove these infinitive markers. Is this making sense to you when we say verbs have to activate their features? For example, see a verb always carries these features. If a verb has to activate its feature, let us say past tense, it cannot activate that feature without removing this marker. We cannot say to went. We have, in order to say I went there, we have to remove this infinitive marker and then verb transforms into a past tense, transforms into something which looks like a past tense marker. Is this making sense to you? So, these are the features of verbs. I will talk about modality and modality some other time to you. Let me talk about the features and nouns and the reason why I call it features and nouns and verbs is because these features of nouns get into agreement with the verbs. So, features like number, we have heard these words singular number, plural number, features like person, first person, second person, third person. I am not asking you to give me examples of these things at this moment, but I just want to make sure that you have heard these words, first person, second person, third person and then gender like masculine and feminine. These are simple things which are all in coded in nouns. Therefore, these are called nominal features. How about case? Have you heard this word case? Nominative case, accusative case. So, we will talk about them as well. Remember how, what we were talking about sentences yesterday? In a sentence, a noun becomes a subject or an object depending upon its position. Remember that? Those positions are relevant to cases. So, a noun gets either infinitive case or accusative case or genitive case or something else depending upon its occurrence in a sentence. However, the assumption is all nouns carry all features. Depending upon the position of occurrence of a noun in a sentence, a particular case gets activated. So, if we are saying John likes pizza, John being in the subject position activates its nominative case. Therefore, we say subjects always have nominative case. Pizza being in an object position activates its accusative case. If we change these nominals with their different positions, then they will have different cases. Understand this point? The reason why we are talking about this is because it is very significant for us to understand that in a particular position, when a particular noun activates its case, it is not that those verbs, those nouns receive those cases there. They already have their cases and they get activated. There is a big debate in linguistic theory about this particular aspect, whether verbs assign cases to nouns like subjects and objects where that is whether nouns receive cases from the verbs or they carry all the cases and then verbs help them activate their features. This is a big debate in linguistic theory. I will try to make it as simple as I can. The important point is to look at and to know about these features as a nominal features. Are you with me so far? Let us look at one more point before the structure and see how they work, how they are at play. Now I am going to talk about agreement in order to show you these features. Can everybody read this sentence? You can. Raju movie dek raha tha. It is a Hindi sentence. Raju movie dek raha tha. Now I want you to pay attention to the glasses in the second line. Also, at this point I want you to look at it. This is how examples are written in a linguistics paper or a book. This is the convention of writing an example of examples from languages other than English. If we are quoting examples from any language, this is how we write the example. We write the sentence with the help of phonetic transcription as accurately as we can. There are standardized ways of doing this thing and then we give word by word meaning of it which is called gloss. Then we elaborate relevant features of that particular constituent and then finally we give its English meaning. The advantage of this thing is people working with these things do not need to know a particular language. When we put things this way we know we only need to know what we are talking about. For example, if you know Hindi it is good. You do not have to know this thing. What you have to see is Raju is the first noun in this sentence. Movie dek raha tha. Dek raha tha is verb and movie is its object. The order of this is predictable because we know Hindi is a verb final language. We see dek raha tha the whole verbal component verb part at the end of this sentence. Movie is the object in this sentence. It is near the verb. See that in a sequence of occurrence it is close to the verb. We see some of the features activated on these components. Raju it has got masculine gender, nominative case and it is third person singular. It is aspect making sense. Masculine noun should not be difficult. Singular number should not be difficult. It is third person and because it is in a subject position it is nominative case. Movie as a Hindi word it has feminine gender and accusative case. Now look at the verb dek raha tha. Dek raha tha the verb dek na means to see or to watch. Now look at this part of the verb raha tha. This is the part which shows aspectual marker. In this particular case it is progressive aspect or continuous aspect and the last component tha is a tense marker in the sentence. That is tense marker on the verb. Now what is the verb also carries masculine gender and singular form. If you look at these three components of this Hindi sentence is it possible for you to figure out which noun in this sentence agrees with the verb and when we say agrees with the verb we mean the features of the noun agrees with the features on verb. Raju why not movie? It is feminine but the verb tha is masculine so it is not in. Very nice. So it is very simple idea and this is why I am spending couple of minutes on this and want you to understand that when we talk about all these words singular noun, plural, masculine, feminine, nominative, accusative these names may sound like we are listening to these things for the first time but the idea that they depict and the way they work is pretty simple. Agreement simply means its features are going to be matched on verbs and subjects. That is a nominal position nominal element in that position. The fact that this nominal position nominal element in the subject position is masculine and it has it is singular and the verb shows masculine and singular, verb shows masculine and singular features then we know that this noun Raju agrees with the verb. I want you to know at this point that you are going to see this agreement only at the last element, last part of the verb. This whole thing is verbal component. It is also called verbal complex and Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam most of the South Asian languages, almost all South Asian languages show the features of agreements at the last element. This is why they are called peripherial features. They will show it on the last element. Now one more point about this aspect Ratha. This indicates continuous aspect marker. What do we mean by continuous? So look at this. When we say tense, tense is different from aspect. Tense only talks about time and whether present, past or future that is about time but the manner in which something is done and also sentences give us more information about a particular accent than the time alone. So this particular aspect talks about the continuity of this action at that point in time which means whenever we are talking about in that present moment the whole act of watching was in progress, was in continuity. That is what that, that aspect of meaning becomes clearer through this word, this element therefore this is called aspect. What was he watching? What was Raju watching? Movie. That it should be difficult for us to figure out that this is the object and what type of a verb is this? Why? Because it answers the question what? It answers the question what? What was watching what? Watching movie. It answers the question what therefore it is a transitive verb. Are you with me now? Do we understand agreement and do we understand how the components and the types of verbs that we discussed yesterday work in a sentence? What are the features on noun that is the subject Raju that takes part in agreement of the noun Raju that is in the subject position in this sentence is playing a role in the agreement. You see there are so many things masculine noun, nominative case, third person, singular mark, singular number. So, which one of these are playing a role in the agreement on the verb? It is not about Hindi or English. Singular number and masculine gender. So, this sentence agrees with the verb in this sentence the subject Raju agrees with the verb in terms of singular number and masculine gender. The features that take place in agreement. Let us go back to the old slide the last one look at the nominal features on the look at the nominal features. There may be a lot of them, but not all the features are always taking part in agreement only some of them will be taking part in agreement. That is not all the features are always active in the sentence. So, going back to the same slide again in the English sentence if you look at the meaning of this Hindi one Raju was watching a movie. If I ask you about this English sentence what are the features that are active in agreement? Do we understand this question? In English sentence Raju was watching a movie. What are the features that are active in the agreement between verb and the subject? Only singular. Raju has masculine masculine gender that is it still has masculine gender, but is that masculine gender playing any role in the agreement in English sentence? No. This is just to show you that in Hindi there are more features that are playing role in agreement. In English one less. Now let us make this sentence Raju was watching a movie. Let us make this verb plural. If we say Raju and Mahesh what do we have to do? Watch watching a movie is that a good sentence? Raju and Mahesh were watching a movie. Is this a good sentence? This is an ungrammatical sentence. Why is this ungrammatical sentence? One person at a time please. Was carrying the singular features, but the subjects are plural. Raju and Mahesh So this element which is subject of the sentence is carrying now plural number and the verb is still depicting singular number. This shows that there is a mismatch in the agreement. In other words the subject does not agree with the verb. Therefore the sentence crashes and therefore it is called ungrammatical. We are talking about a very simple very simple thing, but every time in a discussion like this when someone says the sentence is ungrammatical I want you to know what it means for a sentence to be ungrammatical. At the same time I want you to know that what does it mean when we say the agreement between the subject and the verb is good. So this sentence becomes grammatical when we have a verb showing plural agreement mark. Then the sentence becomes grammatical. Good? Yeah, go ahead. Instead of Raju, I mean take Sita or something. It is feminine, singular. So it is similar to more. It is feminine and singular. So in the last tense, in the last, so it should be T, right? Right. It is also feminine and singular. So both nouns are similar in the carrying a similar. So which noun is in agreement? Which of them? You understand this question? Very significant question. It is asking, in this case we know that the subject has a masculine gender and therefore it is okay for us to figure out about the agreement feature on the verb. What about sentences where subject and object are both feminine and the verb shows feminine agreement marker? In those cases, how do we know which noun agrees with the verb? Do you understand this question? That is his question. The answer is very simple. First of all, therefore I gave you this kind of a sentence to show you clearly that only one noun, only one noun, only one noun, let us say Raju agrees with the verb, that is all right. Raju agrees with the, only one noun Raju agrees with the verb which is masculine and therefore it shows masculine features on the verb. When they are both feminine, the computation in human mind knows about this thing. Which noun is in agreement with the features on the verb? It may not be obvious in the sentence. Suppose if I put both the feminine nouns here, then it is difficult for me to convince you but still our mind knows which noun is in agreement with the verb. To bring that thing out, we do this combination. Under no circumstances, both the nouns will be in agreement with the verb. Only one noun has to agree with the verb and there are cases. We are going to come to those cases, that is those examples to show you that in some cases nouns in the subject position, nouns that may look like in subject positions, subject positions do not agree with the verb and there are additional constraints on that. I will show you that as well but this is a wonderful question and even in the cases where both the nouns are feminine, only the noun in the subject position will agree with the verb. Now we go back to categories of elements in a sentence and we will talk about four of them, that is a noun, a verb, adjective and prepositions. Have we had about these names? These words, nouns, verbs, nouns and verbs we have discussed. Please give me an example of an adjective. Somebody say anything. Example of an adjective. Beautiful. Beautiful. More. Strong, tall. Strong, tall, dark. All those are adjectives. How about preposition? In on, at, right, these are the elements that are prepositions. In a language like English, these elements occur in the, they occur before a noun, therefore they are called prepositions. In languages like Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, these elements occur after a noun. That is they follow a noun, therefore they are called postpositions. So we will be using these two terms prepositions and postpositions interchangeably referring to the same element. The only difference is in a language like English, because they occur before a noun they are called prepositions. In a language like Hindi, because they occur after a noun, therefore they are called postpositions. Another significant aspect from this distinction of preposition and postposition that comes out naturally is prepositions and postpositions always follow only nouns or always precede only nouns and that is also helpful in defining a noun. If we have a question, how do we identify an element in a sentence as noun? You put a prepositions or postpositions after that or before that depending upon the language and then you can see that is a noun or not. Take example, if I say on the table, because it is a good sequence table is a noun, because of the presence of on. Table cannot be anything else because we cannot say on beautiful in a strong. Can we say these sequences? We cannot. So, prepositions and postpositions define nouns in a structural way. We will talk about that. We are going to be also looking at relationship between elements and nodes. I will talk to you about nodes. So, that much we will be able to discuss today. So, let me let me talk about them. I am also going to introduce you to what we mean. Give me an example of a noun. We have talked about a lot of them, nouns and verbs. Give me an example of a noun. Anybody? A good looking noun. By good looking noun, I do not mean anything else. I am only saying which qualifies to be a noun in a nice way. Horse? I take that. I take horse. Can we put an article before that? Can we say the horse? Yes. What is this noun? What is this noun? Horse by itself was a noun. What do we call this sequence noun? The horse. Have you have you thought about this thing? Is it more than a noun now? It has something else. Therefore, it is more than a noun. Now, this will be called a noun phrase. In a phrase, we have something more than what the phrase has in its center, which means if we are talking about a noun phrase, in the center of the noun phrase, we are going to find a noun. Then it may have little bit more elements around them. I am trying to talk to you about the difference between a noun and a noun phrase. This may sound very trivial, but it is a very critical distinction in the formation of a sentence. So, horse is a noun. A horse or the horse becomes a noun phrase because it is a bigger chunk than the word alone. So, the way syntax captures this distinction is the following. Let me tell you now, structure of a noun phrase. This is how it is going to look like. I am going to describe this to you. It is a very simple idea. Now, let us see how it works. This is called a tree, a linguistic tree, which captures one particular phrase called noun phrase. Linguistic trees are usually binary. The reason why I am saying usually binary because in older versions of syntactic explanations, we used to have multiple branching trees. Over number of years with lot of research that has gone into it, the trees are only binary. This node tells us that we are talking about a noun phrase. So, everything that comes under this node is part of noun phrase. This is a place for an expression. This is called a specifier. This place is called a specifier which talks about which creates a space for other elements in the sentence, in this phrase that is noun phrase. This phrase is headed by an element which is called noun. So, in the head position of this phrase, we are going to have noun. Then, this element is called complement which creates another space for something to come in as an essential part of this phrase. I will tell you about specifier and complement more in a moment. For the time being, let us look at its branchage, its binary. Everything under this is a noun phrase. Everything under this is part of this phrase and the two sides are called branchage. Two branches in this tree and two branches indicate relationship between two components as equal. The way we refer to it is, see the element noun and if there is a complement related to that, that element both are sisters to each other. That is both are equal. Now, in a specifier, in this phrase, do not have sister relationships. One is higher than the other. Therefore, this relationship becomes hierarchical. For the easiness of this description, we call this node as the mother node. So, this is mother. Then, everything else to this mother, everything else of this phrase is related to this node and then these two have sister relationships among each other. These two also will have the same relationship, but the relationship between this and this, that is these two nodes is hierarchical. Therefore, it has been designed this way because we want to capture the hierarchical relationship between these elements. Are you with me so far? I will show you the relevance of why we capture such relationships and why we need to capture such relationships as well, but right now I want you to pay attention to the tree alone, how this is drawn. If we are talking about a noun phrase, the head of the noun phrase is a noun. The head of a verb phrase will be a verb. Head of a propositional phrase will be a proposition. You understand this thing? Because the head of a noun phrase is a noun, head of a verb phrase is a verb, head of a propositional phrase is going to be proposition and head of a adjectival phrase is going to be an adjective. Therefore, this whole thing is called x bar. So, what we do is we call x p, spec x bar and the head here and the compound. That is the reason why this whole idea and whole theory is called x bar theory. They are please please keep only couple of points in the mind. The trees are linguistic structure, structural trees are binary and one of the objective is to capture hierarchical relationship among the elements within that phrase. So, we will stop here at this point and then we will elaborate on what else we do with this x bar theory and how we capture structural relationship between the elements next time we meet.