ABSTRACT
An abbreviation for ‘inflection,’ this is an abstract representation of the morphological features of the subject via agreement and the predicate via tense as a syntactic category in a tree diagram. This category was introduced by N.Chomsky in Government and Binding theory and comprises features of agreement (in person and number, and gender for some languages) of the verb and tense. In earlier versions of generative grammar this was accomplished by the auxiliary. The phrase structure rule S→NP INFL VP (earlier versions required S→NP VP) makes it possible to regard the sentences as a projection of INFL, in agreement with X-bar theory, not of NP or VP. Since considering S to be a projection of NP or of VP led to internal theoretical problems, Chomsky postulated the analysis of the category S as a projection of the INFL node. That is to say, S is an element of the same category as INFL, but of greater complexity than INFL. The above-mentioned phrase structure rule is, according to Chomsky, therefore simply an abbreviation for the more explicit rule INFL1 →NP INFL0 VP.
