past participles - Grammatical structure of the sentence "There is no dinosaur skin left to study."

I am trying to figure out the grammatical structure of the following sentence:

There is no dinosaur skin left to study.

This is what I have:

There is -> (what?) -> no skin -> (which/what?) -> left -> (for what?) -> (to study).

What is the word left (in a grammatical sense)? It's definitely not acting as a verb here.

Answer

There is no dinosaur skin left to study

The types of word in the sentence are:

• there, pronoun



• is auxiliary verb


• no determiner *


• dinosaur noun


• skin noun,


• left adjective


• to [very contentious word] 'subordinator'


• study verb, infinitive

[*Determiners are words like: a, the, this, that, my, your, no, one, two.]

This sentence is an example of an existential construction.

The subject of the sentence is [there], the predicate is [is no dinosaur skin left to study]. The predicate consists of the auxiliary verb [is] and two complements, which are the noun phrase [no dinosaur skin to study] and the adjective [left]. Further below I will show what has happened to this noun phrase and why it has broken into two sections.

The noun phrase can be represented like this:

• [[no][dinosaur skin to study]]

It has an external modifier, the determiner [no], and an 'inner noun phrase', sometimes called a nominal: [dinosaur skin to study]. The nominal, and indeed the whole noun phrase is headed by the noun [skin]. [Skin] is being premodified by another noun [dinosaur], giving us the compound noun [dinosaur skin]. The noun has a post-head modifier, the infinitival clause [to study]. Depending on which grammar you read, this could have different structures. In CaGEL, the analysis would be that the head of the clause is the verb [study]. This is marked by the subordinator [to].

In this sentence we see something called 'extraposition from noun phrase movement. Sometimes, if a noun phrase is very 'heavy', if it is very long, we can move part of it to the end of the sentence. We could build the sentence like this:

• There is no dinosaur skin to study left.

But this is a little bit difficult to understand, because we have to wait a long time to hear the second complement left. We can move that section to study 'out of the noun phrase and put it at the end of the sentence. (Extra in extraposition means 'out; position means something like putting). This gives us the Original Poster's example:

• There is no dinosaur skin left to study.

The CaGEL is the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Huddleston & Pullum, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Hope this is helpful!

[[Analysis Note: The grammatical structure of this sentence might be a little ambiguous. This is an existential construction. For the purposes of this analysis I have taken the non-existential version of this sentence to be: [No dinosaur skin to study was left]. The following alternative is not felicitous: [* No dinosaur skin left was to study] (wrong). This last fact accounts for the extraposition analysis. However, there is always: [No dinosaur skin was left to study]. The most natural reading of this sentence, does not have the same meaning as the existential counterpart.]]