LING 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Broccoli
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Syntactic categories: word classes ( categories = parts of speech ) Notice: no single test is sufficient to decide the category of a word. Illustration: noun can take the affix-s (plural) book/books pencil/pencils sheep/*sheeps. If we use several of them we get a better picture of the pattern of behavior of the word. Give me two types of evidence to support your answer. What position does it appear in? (1) the __ is on the table. Noun: i threw the remote at the tv. Plural: there are two remotes on the table. Adjective: the group of people were very remote. Lexical versus grammatical categories: lexical categories: noun, adjective, verb, adverb, grammatical categories: little words like: the, a this, very, so may, is. Lexical categories have semantic content, grammatical categories do not cook/be (lexical v. grammatical) It"s possible to create new members of lexical categories. Grammatical categories have few members, and we can"t create new ones easily.