A constituent is any syntactic unit, regardless of length or syntactic category.

A single
word is the smallest possible constituent belonging to a particular syntactic category.
So if a single word can substitute for a string of several words, then that's evidence
that the single word and the string are both constituents of the same category.
* What did you feed
___ long, fluffy tails?
b.
c.
d.

--- *
>
* How did the cat stroll across
the porch ___ confident air?
* How did Ali Baba return from
his travels ___ before?
* How did they arrive at the
concert hall ___ had expected?

The cats
with.
--->
* With a.
--->

* Wiser than.

--->

* More quickly
than they.

It clefts are derived from ordinary declarative sentences as follows. We can often
divide an ordinary sentence into two parts: a part that contains background
information that is presupposed and a part that is particularly informative,
the focus. In an it cleft, the background information and the focus are indicated
unambiguously by the way that they fit into a syntactic frame consisting of it, a form
of the copula to be, and the element that.

Question/sentence * What will

fragment:
she do a book?
e. It cleft focus:

--- *
>

Write
.

She will write a --->

book.

* It is write that she will

___ a book

The purpose of any model is to help us understand some part of reality that is too
complex to understand in all of its detail, at least all at once. This means that models
are partial in two respects. First, models often leave out many properties of a
phenomenon that aren't relevant from a particular point of view.
Syntactic arguments, on the other hand, are constituents that appear in particular
syntactic positions (see Chapter 4 for further discussion). Semantic arguments are
typically expressed as syntactic arguments, but the correspondence between the two
is not perfect, as (8b) shows.
The term transitivity refers to the number of arguments that a verb combines with in
syntactic structure, and we can divide verbs into three subcategories as in (9).
The two linguistic relations discussed so far---argumenthood and modification---are
basically semantic notions that are optionally expressed in the syntax. In this section,

we introduce a third relation, predication, which differs from argumenthood and

modification in being an irreducibly syntactic relation. By this, we mean that
predication is not always semantically motivated.

There also exist instances of predication without any overt element at all that
corresponds to a modal. Such instances of predication are called small clauses (the
idea behind the name is that the absence of a modal element makes them smaller than
an ordinary clause). (36)-(39) provide some examples of small clauses; the captions
indicate the syntactic category of the small clause's predicate.

We consider [ the proposed solution completely inadequate ]

.
b.

They proved [ the theory false ] .

Small clauses are typically arguments of verbs, but they can also be arguments of
(certain) prepositions. This is illustrated in (40) for with.

a. Adjective
phrase:

With the weather much less

turbulent, flights were able
resume for the first time in
days.

b.

Noun phrase:

c.

Prepositional phrase:

d.

Verb phrase (gerund):

With his wife an airline industry

lobbyist, the senator's support
for the bailout was hardly
surprising.
With all of their three kids in
college, their budget is pretty
tight.
With the parade passing right
outside her living-room
window, Jenny could hardly
have had a better view of it.

Although imperative sentences like (41) appear to lack a subject, there is reason to
believe that they contain a second-person subject comparable to the
pronoun you except that it is silent (the "you understood" of traditional grammar).
(41)

Come over here.