01:615:201 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Peanut Butter, Determiner, Phrase Structure Rules
9 May 2016
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Also known as syntactic categories or word classes. They indicate how a word functions in a sentence. It is most important to determine the part of speech based on distributional evidence (how a word is used in a sentence) If a word successfully replaces man, the word is also a noun. If a word doesn"t successfully replace man, the word is not a noun. This categorization allows us to make empirical generalizations and predictions about other words. Caveat: the trouble with traditional definitions is that they are inherently semantic (meaning-based) instead of syntactic (structural). The destruction of the city bothered the mongols. destruction describes an action but it is situated as a noun. The key to part of speech is usage. The yinkish dripner blorked quastofically into the nindin with the pidibs. This sentence composed of nonce/wug (nonsense) words proves that it is usage, not meaning that determines a word"s part of speech in a given sentence.
