The distinction between “lay” and “lie” continues to fade. Almost without exception, people say, “I laid on the couch.” They never seem to say, “I lay on the couch.” Plus, people usually throw in the ...

Different verbs take different types of complements and assign them to various positions. Two that we will consider here are ergative and unaccusative verbs. The basic one each assign a single ...

WHEN we were children and just beginning to learn English grammar, many of us were taken aback by the strange failure of some verbs to work in certain sentence constructions. For instance, perhaps ...

PPs may be adjoined to both NP and VP or they may function as a complement to either category. Given a phrase with a PP, it is not easy to determine the PP is a complement or a modifier. A couple of ...