Ling 401 09/05/13
Syntactic categories
Semantic definitions of categories are imperfect and it’s difficult to define categories as such based only on semantic criteria (a verb is not always an action, a noun is not always a place or a thing).
Nouns, adverbs, verbs, adverbs have specific properties such as position and endings.
- The blinkish trupet lampes kripatily with the zytups in the macrot.
Blinkish has an adjective ending –ish, appears after ‘the’ and before the noun
Trupet after an adjective before the verb
Lampes appears after the noun, has a verb ending –s
Kripatily after the verb has an adverb ending -ly
Zytups after the preposition and the determiner, has a noun ending –s for plural
Macrot same, but no ending.
It is definitely not by the meaning but through the information given by the morphology and the distribution that we can determine what part of speech a word is.
Morphological distribution
Affixes: derivational (creates a new word by changing its category)
Ex. ‘–al’ change a noun into an adjective. ‘–ly’ a adjective into an adverb; Some requires none (run: noun and verb)
inflectional (doesn’t change the category of a word but is added to specific categories) –ed to verbs, -s to nouns, -er to adjectives, etc.
See: Kindness, joyful, amazement, speaker, national, performance.
Syntactic distribution: which nearby words appear.
Main parts of speech: Noun (N), Verb (V), Adjective (Adj), Adverbs (Adv)
| Derivational | Inflectional | Syntactic distribution | |
| Noun | -ness, -ation, -ist… | -s | After a determinerafter an adjective
after a prep Subject Object Direct Indirect Object
|
| Verb | -ise/ize, -ate.. | Present tense, past tense, progressive forms, passivized –en/ed, | After auxiliary + modals, adverb,After subject
|
| Adjective | -ing, -able, -ly,-ish… | Superlative, comparative -er, -est | b. det and nounsmodified by adv. very |
| Adverb | -ly | None | Not after a det and before a noun – in complementary distribution with adjectives.Modified by very.
Beginning or end clause |
Open vs. closed class
Open class: create new words
What categories?
Closed class: very unlikely to create new words
Lexical vs. functional parts of speech (+/- equivalent to open vs. closed class)
Lexical Contribute to the main meaning /content of the sentence
= verbs, nouns, adjective, adverbs
Functional: provide grammatical info and keep the sentence together
= Auxiliaries, complementizers, prepositions, conjunction, negation, modals, determiners
Functional Parts of Speech = closed class
Prepositions P
With, in, for, to…
Before nouns, in NPs
Determiners Det
Articles The, a/an, this, that, these, those
quantifiers every, some, many, most…
numerals: 1, 2, 3..
possessives pronouns: my, your, his, her…
wh words
Before nouns, beginning of NPs
Conjunctions Conj
Connect two phrases
And, or, nor, neither—nor, either…or
Complementizers C
Connect but embed (though you can have a ‘that’ clause starting a sentence)
That, for, if, whether
Tense T
Auxiliary: have, be, do
Modals: should, would, could, shall, can,…
Non-finite tense marker: to
Negation Neg ‘not’
Subcategories and features
Auxiliaries T[-modal, -nonfinite]
Modal T [+modal, -nonfinite]
To T [-modal, +nonfinite]
Plurality: singular/plural [± plural]
Mass/count [± count]
Mass nouns can’t take many but Count nouns can:
? many apples *much bottles
*many air ? much air
*many wind ? much wind
?many cats * much cats
cats [+count] air, wind [-count]
Pronoun and anaphor: her / herself [± pronoun, ± anaphor]
Him, herself
*the him , *the herself
* nice him, * nice herself
him [+pronoun, – anaphor] herself [+pronoun, + anaphor]
Proper vs. common: proper noun can’t take a determiner
* The Andrew Carnie (unaccented)
Subcategories of verbs
Predicate and argument structure: each predicate has a specific valency, the number of (obligatory) arguments it requires.
Valency of 1 = one argument, intransitive (smile, arrive, sit, run)
Valency of 2 = two arguments, transitive (hit, love, kiss…)
Valency of 3 = three arguments, ditransitive (give, put, tell)
- Exercise 1 p.56
a) The old rusty pot-belly stove was replaced.
D adj adj adj N T V
b) The red-haired assistant put the vital documents through the new
D Adj N V D Adj N P D Adj
efficient shredder.
Adj N
c) The large evil leathery alligator complained to his aging keeper about his
Det Adj Adj Adj N V P Det Adj N P Det
extremely unattractive description.
Adv Adj N