Morphological Dependencies in English

This paper presents accounts of preposition selection and agreement in English within Dynamic Syntax. To achieve this, I introduce two new, non-semantic, labels into the tree language: Ph that takes as values phonological forms which are modelled as ordered sets of phonemes and Md which takes as values sets of Ph values, the phonological forms of certain words and forms with which a particular word can collocate. While these labels are not grounded in semantic concepts like type and formula, they are nevertheless grounded in phonological concepts and thus ultimately in phonetic phenomena. These labels are introduced through the parsing of words and are used to constrain the forms of other words they can felicitously appear with, such as nouns and certain determiners or verbs with selected prepositions or prepositional phrases, in a straightforward manner. It is shown how the remnant agreement and selection patterns in modern (standard) English can be captured without any recourse to traditional categories such as gender, person and number. Certain disagreement phenomena are discussed as are the broader implications of the approach.