29. Causative forms

A causative form, in linguistics, is an expression of an agent causing or forcing a patient to perform an action (or to be in a certain condition). All languages have ways to express causation, but they differ in the means. In some languages there are morphological devices (such as inflection) that change verbs into their causative forms, or adjectives into verbs of "becoming". Other languages employ periphrasis, with idiomatic expressions or auxiliary verbs. All languages also have lexical causative forms (such as English "rise" → "raise").

30. Phrasal verbs as a linguistic problem

Phrasal verbs

What is a phrasal verb? A phrasal verb is a verb combined with a preposition. The preposition can add extra meaning to the verb or give it more emphasis.

Could you switch off the light, please?

I had an ice-cream to cool down.

Some, prepositions change the meaning of different verbs in a similar way. The preposition away, for example, can mean away from here, or it can mean intensively. This means that it can be combined with any verb of activity.

I didn't hear the telephone because I was working away.

I've been typing away all morning.

31. The object as a syntactic category

Definition

A syntactic category is a set of words and/or phrases in a language which share a significant number of common characteristics. The classification is based on similar structure and sameness of distribution (the structural relationships between these elements and other items in a larger grammatical structure), and not on meaning. In generative grammar, a syntactic category is symbolized by a node label in a constituent structure tree.

Also known as:

Syntactic class Kinds

There are major and minor syntactic categories:

Major categories

All phrasal syntactic categoriesExamples:

NP (noun phrase), VP (verb phrase), PP (prepositional phrase)

Word-level syntactic categories that serve as heads of phrasal syntactic categories

Examples:

noun, verb

See:

lexical category Minor categories

Categories that do not project to a phrasal levelExample:

Yes-No question markers

Contrast

Contrast syntactic category with the following:

Grammatical category (person, number, tense, aspect, mood, gender, case, voice...)

Grammatical class (transitive and intransitive verbs; count and mass nouns…)

Grammatical relations (subject, direct object, indirect object…)

Functional categories (agent, patient, instrument…; topic, comment…; definite NP)

Note: The terms grammatical category and grammatical class have also been used as synonyms for ‘part of speech’.

32. The category of assessment(value judgments)

A value judgment is a judgment of the rightness or wrongness of something, or of the usefulness of something, based on a comparison or other relativity. As a generalization, a value judgment can refer to a judgment based upon a particular set of values or on a particular value system. A related meaning of value judgment is an expedient evaluation based upon limited information at hand, an evaluation undertaken because a decision must be made on short notice.The term value judgment can be used objectively to refer to any injunction that implies an obligation to carry out an act, implicitly involving the terms "ought" or "should". It can be used either in a positive sense, signifying that a judgment must be made taking a value system into account, or in a disparaging sense, signifying a judgment made by personal whim rather than objective thought or evidence.[1]In its positive sense, a recommendation to make a value judgment is an admonition to consider carefully, to avoid whim and impetuousness, and search for consonance with one's deeper convictions, and to search for an objective, verifiable, public, and consensual set of evidence for the opinion.In its disparaging sense the term value judgment implies a conclusion is insular, one-sided, and not objective — contrasting with judgments based upon deliberation, balance and public evidence. Value judgment also can refer to a tentative judgment based on a considered appraisal of the information at hand, taken to be incomplete and evolving, for example, a value judgment on whether to launch a military attack, or as to procedure in a medical emergency.[2] In this case the quality of judgment suffers because the information available is incomplete as a result of exigency, rather than as a result of cultural or personal limitations.Most commonly the term value judgment refers to an individual's opinion. Of course, the individual's opinion is formed to a degree by their belief system, and the culture to which they belong. So a natural extension of the term value judgment is to include declarations seen one way from one value system, but which may be seen differently from another. Conceptually this extension of definition is related both to the anthropological axiom "cultural relativism" (that is, that cultural meaning derives from a context) and to the term "moral relativism" (that is, that moral and ethical propositions are not universal truths, but stem from cultural context). A value judgment formed within a specific value system may be parochial, and may be subject to dispute in a wider audience.