LING 20 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Syntactic Category, Nonfinite Verb, Mass Noun
Words and Why they matter to Syntax
- Part of speech (Syntactic category, word class): if we have categories for words that can
appear in certain positions and categories for those that don’t, we can make
generalizations about the behaviour of different word types
Determining Part of Speech
-Problem of Traditional Definitions:
Words take many forms of meaning depending on the
parts of speech
- Distributional Criteria:
- Morphological Distribution: refers to the kinds of affixes and other morphology
that appear on a word. (Derivational and Inflectional morphemes)
- Syntactic Distribution: refers to what other words appear near the word
The major Parts of speech: N, V, Adj, and Adv
-Syntactic Distribution:
i.e Noun often appear after determiners such as the, those, thes
and can appear after adjectives.
-Derivational Suffixes:
verbs often end in derivational endings such as -ate, and -izelise
Open vs Closed; Lexical vs Functional
- Parts of speech that allow new member are said to be open class. Those that don't are
closed class.
- Lexical part of language: provide the content of the sentence
- Functional: provide the grammatical information
Subcategories and features
- Subcategories
- Six kinds of D (articles, deictics, quantifiers, numerals, possessive pronouns,
wh-pronouns)
- Three kinds of T (auxiliaries, modals, and the non-finite marker)
- One way to mark subcategories is through the use of features
- Count vs mass noun distinction
- Proper names and common nouns
- Pronouns and anaphors
- Subcategories of verbs
- Divvy up verbs in terms of number of noun phrases and prepositional
phrases or clauses
- Intransitive: predicate to only takes one argument
- Transitive: predicates that take two argument
- Ditransitive: three argument
Document Summary
Part of speech (syntactic category, word class): if we have categories for words that can appear in certain positions and categories for those that don"t, we can make generalizations about the behaviour of different word types. Problem of traditional definitions: words take many forms of meaning depending on the. Morphological distribution: refers to the kinds of affixes and other morphology that appear on a word. (derivational and inflectional morphemes) Syntactic distribution: refers to what other words appear near the word. The major parts of speech: n, v, adj, and adv and can appear after adjectives. Syntactic distribution: i. e noun often appear after determiners such as the, those, thes. Derivational suffixes: verbs often end in derivational endings such as -ate, and -izelise. Parts of speech that allow new member are said to be open class. Open vs closed; lexical vs functional closed class. Lexical part of language: provide the content of the sentence.
