 We looked at thematic relations yesterday right and now we are coming back again to structural relations and we will be looking at case but before and these are the two questions which we need to understand what is case and how do we understand them configurationally. If I ask you this question what is case have you heard this word case before yes can you give couple of examples of that in which context did you hear this term case name what is that Kartha is the name of a case and Karak is the Hindi word for case anything else anybody wants to add anything else no okay. So there are there are several of them case simply means that in a different in different positions in a sentence okay different NPs have different cases what are the different positions in a sentence that you have seen so far according to grammatical relations the different positions are subjects and objects right semantically speaking we saw yesterday agent theme right sometimes patient sometimes experiential and several other themes again talking about grammatical relations a subject is supposed to have a different case and an object is supposed to have a different case okay and this happens through a structural relations and this is what we are going to look at okay but give it a moment I wanted to talk to you about these sentences where we stopped yesterday and then we are going to come back to structural relations in a moment remember these sentences simple ones right what I want to know what I want to ask you before is did I did I talk to you about two types of there two types of that and I talked to you that one is demonstrative pronoun and the other was anybody there was another one too right which was not demonstrative pronoun do you remember that much there are two types one is demonstrative pronoun when we say that men or that room that boy these are these are examples of demonstrative pronoun if we are talking about that but there are certain places where the same element that does not have the same meaning so you know at least this much right so that that is a different type of that so we we can say there are two types of such elements similarly there are others other elements in a language like English which has at least two different functions and two of them are it and there what what do these two words mean it and there they are they are also sort of pronouns right which which and as we know about canonical definition of a pronoun pronouns are replacing nouns right so anyway they are nouns but if you look at this sentence it rained what is the meaning of the word it you know the sentence if if someone asks okay how do we say this sentence in Hindi say Varsha we we the same sentence right how how do I say it is raining or a hair right how about Telugu okay either way is fine for me it is raining how do we say okay same sentence of Telugu can be translated this way it is raining right now what is the meaning of it in English in the sentence of English all of us all of you know these sentences right if someone asks you and the reason why I am spending a minute on this sentence if someone asks you how do you know how to say the same thing in your language if someone asks you to translate or say the same thing same thing in English you are going to say this way it is raining or it rained or it rains right you don't have any difficulty with that keeping that in mind that you have no difficulty with that if someone learning English asks you this question what's the meaning of it how will you answer that question does it have any meaning we we need to move does it have any meaning and if it does what's the meaning am I asked am I asking a complicated too complicated question am I asking you a simple one of the simplest questions one can ask you in a college one can ask you this question even on a road right so I don't think I'm asking an intellectually challenging question I'm only asking you the meaning of a simple word and I don't think English has simpler words than this it what's the meaning of this word in this sentence it I am not interested in noun pronouns or anything I'm only asking what's the meaning of the word it I have a sentence I have heard this sentence somewhere it rained you know English and I don't know I want to know what's the meaning of this word it is that the meaning is that the meaning of the word if someone asks you what's the meaning of Gulab Jamun you say you get this in bigger stores and it it looks red it's sweet is that the meaning of this word that's in a way description of the word right now let's let's move move the point what's the point so at least you you can tell me something no what's the object yes it should have some subject for that right very nice it's a complimentizer it's a complimentizer you have heard the word complimentizer before when I was discussing that right all right not everything is complimentizer right not everything is going to complimentizer is not going to be solution for everything okay but very nice very nice I am yes yes yes right very nice absolutely you you are right but that's the next step right I am not I'm not hung on this question but I want you to understand that if someone asks you the question what's the meaning of it right and without having 25 classes on principles and parameters if you tell them that because the sentence needs to have a subject the person is going to lose interest right however you are absolutely right there is absolutely no problem with what you are saying what I am trying to tell you is that the second stage the first step and that's the very difficult step a difficult in the following sense to understand well what I meant by difficulty it is very difficult to say no okay this word does not have any meaning and this is why probably you have difficulty saying anything about it right when I am saying look at the sentence anything you have difficulty saying anything about it in this sentence it does it does the word it has a meaning yes in the in the sentence that I just said you have difficulty saying anything about it might become sort of repetitive in case in this first sentence if you put the rain rained it becomes very repetitive so we need something which doesn't explicitly say the but sort of okay but his answer is better yeah you see I understand I understand what you are trying to say but I want you to understand do you understand what he said and before that I want you to understand what I am saying what I am saying is this word does not have any meaning in this sentence why it's there and what else could have been there and what why something else could not be there are the stages later given the sentence this is a grammatical sentence of English in this grammatical sentence this word does not have a meaning okay now the second stage is if it doesn't have a meaning what is it doing okay what is it doing here it's doing exactly what he was he's trying to say that every sentence irrespective of English Hindi Telugu Malayalam every sentence must need a subject now and here comes what you are saying it's there is no point saying rain raining right the same thing we can say by raining but we cannot say raining and he gave you another example very nice example when we say rain falls it's a good sentence rain is the subject fall is the verb right it's a good good it's that's a transitive verb but let's let's move ahead with that that's a good sentence it has a subject it has a predicate the sentences seems to be alright but when we say raining or rains doesn't mean much doesn't mean much in the sense that it's not grammatical because it doesn't have a subject and remember it's not even a sentence like go home right go we can say go can we say rain right we are using this as a word it's raining but we cannot say rain because when you say go you are telling someone when you say rain who are you talking to you understand the point we just cannot say rain so it's not any it's not a imperative sentence either therefore it needs a subject and in certain cases when there is it it's just not possible that we don't have a subject this sentence is not allowed in English or for that matter in any language we know that this sentence was okay because we have this right this is okay but this is not okay sentence therefore the words do you see here in blue it's written expletive expletive okay so there are two two elements in English both of them are listed there it and there they in their expletive forms are used to fulfill the requirement of a subject without any meaning so we say it rains it just fulfills a grammatical function supplying a subject to the sentence making sentence grammatical without any meaning of the word it so the word so in that case the sentence is it rains or it is raining or it rained or whatever we are this sentence is semantically null semantically vacuous semantically zero grammatically it's a subject and it's only fulfilling the grammatical function of providing a subject that's the that's that's the point being made here now Sundeep about complementizers so that was a complementizer in the case where we we saw and the name of this thing is again something like what's the name it's not a pronoun expletive or there is another term playonastics doesn't matter what whatever you call it I want you to understand that this is semantically zero which fulfills only grammatical function the another term there has sometimes the same function I am I have digressed little bit from what we were going to do but this is an important point can you give me a sentence with there where their functions as a subject of the sentence there has been a class a class okay there are there are 20 students here right there are 20 students here can we say simply are 20 students here we can say 20 students are here that's fine in that case 20 students become the subject but we cannot say are 20 students here in that case we have to use a word with which is semantically zero again to fulfill the requirement of the subject and then the sentence becomes there are 20 students in the class okay and the sentence becomes good again now think about the same sentence with the question that I have been asking you what's the meaning of there in that sentence there are 20 students in the class what's the meaning of there the answer is nothing though that word does not have its meaning and therefore semantically zero these elements are called the word that without its demonstrative meaning is a complementizer the word words there and it without their meanings are called expletives so complementizers and expletives are in a language only to fulfill grammatical functions clear okay now I have put the term extended projection principle for that okay I just wanted to bring in this term when subject must be present in a sentence the principle is called extended projection principle that is no and by name you can see it's a principle so no language is allowed to violate this thing every language must follow that which means every language must have the subject and this principle is called extended projection principle and in order to obey this kind of a principle English in such cases uses a different term but doesn't leave the subject position empty it copies the same it becomes semantically zero and uses in this term in this place makes a word copies a word there uses in the in the in a sentence in the subject position and does not leave language like English does not leave the subject position empty okay also keep in mind these sentences are not like English not like Hindi sentences or sentences from our languages where we can say understand understand my question understand my sentence when we say in this sentence of Hindi the subject position is not really empty what is the subject position subject in this sentence man therefore not an empty subject therefore the sentence is good and grammatical and subsequently not violating extended projection principle but if we leave these sentences raining or rained the subject is not recoverable from the context or anything else from the inflection subjects are not recoverable from inflection therefore it needs an overt subject how you manage that is the language internal problem and language finds a way to resolve this issue and this is how it results clear we understand extended projection principle go ahead no no but I want you to answer one more question in in the response to your question if I say no right what is the basis of me saying such an emphatic no no not just the native speaker that that's fine because I am because I am a native speaker I can say no no no here I here I want you to allow me a minute of digression again a native speakers capacity or capability is to give you a judgment about the sentence the native speakers capability is to identify a sentence whether a sentence belongs to Hindi or not a native speakers capability is to give you judgment about whether a word belongs to Hindi or not for example you use this word expletive ask any Hindi speaker whether they know Hindi or not I am sorry whether even if they don't know even if they do not know a single word of English they will tell you at least that this word does not belong to Hindi am I right so that's the capacity of a native speaker the capacity of a native speaker does not include telling you does it have any expletive understand the understand the the question doesn't belong to native speakers the question is grammatically motivated and I am saying no why am I saying no because a language like Hindi okay by now you have seen complete IP right by now you have seen what is I what do we call inflection and you have seen the role of inflection in a sentence so when we say the subject I which is may is recoverable from inflection the inflection tells you that the subject is recoverable that that sentence can only have the subject may if a language has rich inflection system it's highly likely that the language will not have expletives expletives are used only when subjects are not recoverable see it's a it's a it's a plain logic if we do we if if we do not have rich inflection to recover subjects then we need expletives in a language like Hindi or Telugu or Malayalam why would you need an expletive however like I said most likely no there might be a context or two in which something may be used as expletives so it it will be too tall a claim to deny that right away right but most likely it will not have an expletive like situation alright expletives extended projection principles requirement of a subject revisited are these things clear inflection and good let's move so along the same lines I just wanted to repeat one more point which we have discussed time to time that and because we are talking about inflection inflection we before this we were talking about inflection expletives and extended projection principle in this context let me make one more point about autonomy of syntax even yesterday I guess we were talking about talking about autonomy of syntax am I right yesterday or maybe the day before yesterday we were talking about autonomy of syntax in the sense that so there are there are going to be two positions one is syntax is completely autonomous that is there is no overlap between syntax and semantics semantics is an independent thing and syntax is independent of semantics okay that is one position and we have sentences like colorless green ideas leaf furiously or the will building the building is walking slowly these are the sentences which can tell us that these sentences irrespective of the meaning are grammatically good right which tells us syntax seems to be autonomous however the other position that to some extent syntax may be autonomous so that we are not denying the first position but it does not seem to be autonomous all the way and that that was the position which I introduced to you yesterday when we were talking about thematic relations right there is one I want to give you one syntactic argument in support of this second position that syntax does not seem to be completely autonomous it is autonomous to a great extent but not all the way look at the two sentences John hit Peter okay and John I'm sorry the first one is John hits Peter right and John hit Peter and the third sentence is John and Mary hit Peter okay now these are pretty simple sentences can I quickly ask you to draw the structure of this very simple sentence John hit Peter in terms of its IP the structure will be we have an IP all right VP and we have so in this specifier position of the IP we have an NP which is John right and then we have the word hit and it has an object which is an NP and this object is do we have this structure everybody I have purposely elaborated this thing the object NP for you to make to reiterate one more point which is the object of this head the object of this head is this entire NP the object of this head is entire NP not just Peter and as long as we know the whole NP is the whole Peter is the whole NP we can we do not need to draw we can just write it here but conceptually we need to understand this with clarity that the object of this head V which is hit is the entire NP not just the head of this NP because in such a case suppose we say John hit the monkey that was running on the road in the evening John hit the monkey that was running on the road in the evening in this case what is the object of the verb hit what is the object of the word verb hit the monkey that was running on the road in the evening the entire chunk and what is that chunk configurationally speaking what is that chunk an NP it will have an N and then it will have a compliment whatever rest of the things will be compliment of that N all right so that and that this becomes clearer only when we know that the compliment of this head V is the NP not the N okay all right so that was another that was another point in this context now keeping this elaborating on the second point of this argument about autonomy of syntax I want to tell you I want to ask you this thing so if first sentence John hits Peter what do I put here in terms of agreement singular and which is S right now in terms of second one so hold on hold on so and what's the tense here present tense singular agreement present tense and then there is an there is in some kind of aspect also can I ask you the this question what's which aspect is here infinite indefinite aspect right all right now so this is the sentence number one tell me about sentence number two singular past tense so we have singular agreement and tense is past right all right how about third third sentence John and Mary hit Peter plural present so agreement is plural and tense is present why not past so pretty simple sentence I'm asking a simple question why not past that's what am I question no no no a sentence at a time cannot be both that's the precise point I'm trying to make hold on for a moment hold on why not just look at the sentence and remove the context that that's the exact point we are trying to make remove the context and just look at the grammar of the sentence looking at the grammar of the that that and I must I'm I'm repeating this because that's the exact point we are trying to make looking at the sentence grammar of the sentence it's difficult to say about sentence number three whether it is present or past understand this in order to say that here we need to talk about its extra sentential features that is context the moment we need to depend on context right context is not grammatical feature we will have to say that syntax cannot be totally autonomous get my point look at the look at the simple sentence and kinds of clarity it gives us at a conceptual level so one we it's a nice sentence colorless green ideas sleep furiously and we we get a nice point that no syntax seems to be autonomous the sentence is still good even if it doesn't mean much the sentence is fine we are not denying that point we are we are saying that to a great extent syntax seems to be autonomous of semantics syntax seems to be autonomous but only to some extent in lot of sentences it's not very clear and as long as we have one example available we can very well make a claim that it does not seem to be completely autonomous we do not need to have quantitatively lot of examples to demonstrate the point that's the beauty of science that's the beauty of a theoretical point we don't need quantitatively a lot of examples it's not a quantitative survey where 70 percent of people response 70 percent of responses is yes and 30 percent responses is no then we take it as yes right it's not it's not a quantitative survey it's a theoretical point it's a scientific investigation and any principle let's not lose the track we are talking about principles and parameters of natural language a single point must be explained in order to dismiss that completely so if someone wants to keep just one position position number one they must answer this question and as long as this question is not answered the second point remains valid clear all right so that's about that's about autonomy of syntax and once again we kind of revised our thing for ip go ahead grammatical rules can have complete autonomy of syntax sure could have you're right so for a for a for example in a language like hindi you will not get this sentence at all this kind of sentence at all sure so in with hindi it's difficult to show that syntax is not autonomous you're right absolutely right but that does not contradict the point exactly language which has accepted such a ambiguous which shows such a such a situation the point is taken care of and and see here we are also not saying that because we found one point the first point is dismissed we are not saying that we are saying that to a great extent it seems autonomous to some extent it seems autonomous all right we can give up and say to a great extent it seems autonomous but not all the way that's the that's the point and that's all we want to accommodate in the principle that can't can't say all the way okay and this thing is this thing we when I talk to you about autonomy of syntax for the first time we were not ready to get this take this point it would not have made much sense at this at that stage I am I'm sure it's making more sense now all right okay now with that we are coming to more of structural relations okay more we are coming to a discussion on case and with these structural relations with these terms we will talk about case so these are the terms we need to understand these and these terms like precedence and dominance government c command and m command these are the few terms which we need to understand with respect to the structure right with respect to a structure precedence dominance are simple terms they do not have much meaning in that government in in day to day language we understand something else with government we need to add a specific meaning to that what we mean by government in terms of a structure and a sentence we'll talk about that and then c command the term means constituent command okay like in a sentence we have several constituents like np vp and again np npp these are the constituents of a sentence so they simply the the term c command simply means constituent command okay and the term m command means maximal command so people don't use the words like constituent command or maximal command in short people use terms like c command and m command we will elaborate on these terms as well very simply let me first so I had this sentence our good old sentence for the purpose of a sentence but now we will work with the sentence that we have on the board right we have just seen the sentence so let's look at the terms of precedence and dominance it's a simple term if I tell you if I tell you that ip in this structure okay dominates everything shouldn't be difficult to understand right ip in this structure on the board dominates everything which means dominates everything below it and this is exactly what we say and node a dominates a node b if and only if a is higher up in the tree than b and there is a line tracing a to b downward thus the second second condition is just restricted okay so node a dominates node b only if and only if a is higher up in the tree than b and there is a line tracing a to b downward this is exactly what we were saying when we said ip dominates everything by everything what do we mean by everything ip dominates np i bar i vp spec v bar v np and likewise okay np the np the spec position this np clearly does not dominate ip but does it dominate i bar given this definition so this is how we need to understand dominance okay and this term becomes important only in the sense that if we want to say in language right like subject dominates object that statement is not going to be true so we we cannot say subject dominates objects understand this so so we we need to define the term dominance only for such regions and this way we are we are not adding or deleting anything from the actual meaning of the term dominance this is what it means right when in in in general also when we say dominance dominion only flows downward dominion does not even flow at the equal level or upward right that is all it it means we are only restating the same thing configurationally same thing about precedence look at that any difficulty with that a node a precedes node b if and only if a is to the left of b and a does not dominate b and b does not dominate understand this so in that terms what can we say this np right precedes vp can we say that spec np np in the position of a spec ip precedes vp we can say that right we can also say this np precedes i bar therefore this np precedes everything else right but the moment the the more we go downward we cannot say spec of vp precedes i I mean that that that sounds little bit ridiculous also but just to make a point I precedes everything else this aspect ip aspect vp precedes v np vnnp right and again v precedes np likewise so we need to we need to understand that these terms precedence and dominance in this term don't do we mean that it has to be at the top of the line or say for example there is np john and then there is this vp i can also go from like this going downward downward yes why do we need to say that downward the the question that you have in mind just to eliminate that question if we don't say downward then what you are saying will be allowed then it will be allowed that this np dominates this vp because there is a line tracing after all there is a line tracing this vp but from this np there is a line tracing this vp but not downward first it has to go upward we want to restrict that kind of a situation where spec of ip will be dominating vp we don't want to say that ip dominates vp i bar dominates vp not even i i precedes vp np precedes vp but doesn't dominate do not dominate vp just to restrict these kinds of situations we are defining it this way right this is this is a very carefully crafted definition i mean i i have not done this this is if you if you look at your book these definitions are there in in chapter 2 or in some place okay just to and and again it's been restricted just to mean what we want it to mean that's all right okay i we already have the then we cannot compare the elements of branch one branch with with the element of another branch say it again say it again please suppose we only have binary structure we cannot have more branches yes one branch with the other one suppose the noun phrases has more than one element suppose there is also a adjective okay describing the noun then those elements cannot be compared with the elements of this branch right no absolutely not yes more than that i think i understand what you are saying but to summarize that the any element in the structure we will decide whether that element precedes or follow precedes or dominates only on the basis of this and it's never going to have more than binary but i do understand what you say even in the binary branching what if can can the two things be compared the question is not of comparison the question is of whether it a node dominates the other one or not and whether a node precedes the other one or not will can only be decided with these these restrictions these are not these are not in a way definitions these are restrictions added to that we already know precedence and dominance we are only putting some some restricting condition on them keeping the structure in mind okay all right then we have we i only had these things to show you precedence and dominance i need to talk to you about a spec head agreement that i want to skip for today and i'll talk to you about it when i discuss i do want to spend another five minutes or five to ten minutes talking to you about ip and expansion of ip remember we have i think we have talked to you about how we can separate the features of i features bundled under ip and have a bigger structure and then it's clear to see that there is a functional layer and there is a lexical layer and then we then we get to see or the question comes up that how come the spec where does the where does the subject go in that case and how can a subject be part of inflectional layer it should be part of a lexical layer and then i also talk to you that in such situation the proposal is that the subject of sub the subject of a sentence actually originates within the vp right and it was at that point where we can see with clarity the the notion of deep structure what does it mean when we say deep structure and then let's not forget that we are talking about all these things under one simple rubric which is i language understand this understand this thing so let me come back to agreement sorry sorry a spec and head agreement and why a spec and head agreement is really important what i mean what i mean by that is this this is the head and this is the specs it's not clear here but there are cases when we expand ip then we understand why this kind of configuration is important why a specifier position is important to a head and how can we maximally exploit it to to understand certain more nuances of natural language