Theoretical Grammar

1. Parts of speech in English.

The notion of parts of speech. The three-criteria approach to the identification of parts of speech (semantic, formal and syntactic criteria).

PREHISTORY. Nouns, Verbs, Adverbs, Participles, Pronouns, Articles, Prepositions, Conjunctions (Dionysius Thrax, 100 B.C.).

Early generativism. Binary features.

Chomsky (1970): +/-N; +/-V: +N, -V = N, -N, +V = V, +N, +V = Adj, -N, -V = P

Jackendoff (1977) (also Bresnan (1982)): +/-subj, +/-obj +subj, -obj = N, +subj, +obj = V -subj, -obj = Adj, -subj, + obj = P

Semantic criterion

The semantic criterion presupposes the evaluation of the generalized meaning, which is characteristic of all the subsets of words constituting a given part of speech. This meaning is understood as the "categorial meaning of the part of speech".

run: meaning = ‘action’, hence it is a verb

cup: meaning = ‘thing’, hence it is a noun

beautiful: meaning = ‘quality of thing/person’, hence it is an adjective

in: meaning = ‘location’, hence it is a preposition (adposition)

quickly: meaning = ‘quality of action’, hence it is an adverb

Problems of the semantic criterion

sleep: meaning = ‘state’ ? destruction: meaning = ‘action’! a verb? sad: meaning = ‘state’ ?

Formal criteria: morphology.

The formal criterion provides for the exposition of the specific in-flexional and derivational (word-building) features of all the lexemic subsets of a part of speech.

1. Nouns: plural morphology, case morphology

2. Verbs: tense, person, number, aspect, voice, mood

3. Adjectives: degrees of comparison

4. Numerals: e.g., specific endings of ordinal numerals

5. Adverbs: degrees of comparison; specific derivational suffixes

Problems of the morph. criterion

English: Adjectives = Adverbs? Nouns = Pronouns? - Languages like Mohawk (Baker (2003)):

Formal criteria: distribution

1. [NP The _______ ] was reading [NP his ______ ].

2. [NP The German _______ ] was pouring [NP hot ______ ]

The police will arrest the students.

... will have arrested...

... would have been arrested...

3. an old tramp; Mary is nice; very beautiful

(Wekker & Haegeman (1996))

Syntactic role criterion

The syntactic role criterion concerns the syntactic role of words in the sentence typical of a part of speech.

Nouns: Subjects and Objects, Verbs: Predicates, Adjectives: Attributes and Predicatives, Adverbs: Adverbial and Adjectival Modifiers

The question about the number of parts of speech in English. Ch. Fries’s (descriptive) approach to establishing classes of words.

Here is how Ch. Fries presents his scheme of English word-classes. For his materials he chooses tape-recorded spontaneous conversations comprising about 250,000 word entries (50 hours of talk). The words isolated from this corpus are tested on the three typical sentences (that are isolated from the records, too), and used as substitution test-frames:

Frame A. The concert was good (always).

Frame B. The clerk remembered the tax (suddenly).

Frame C. The team went there.

The parenthesised positions are optional from the point of view of the structural completion of sentences.

(19 categories: 4 parts of speech (form classes) + 15 function words)

Some modern approaches.

One of the most popular functionalist approaches (cognitive).

Basic grammatical categories: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition or postposition (Langacker 1987)

Functionalist approaches: temporal properties

verbs denote events which are dynamic, short-term states of affairs

adjectives denote states or properties that are medium-term states of affairs

nouns denote things that are long-term states of affairs (Hopper and Thompson (1984), Givon(1984), quoted in Baker 2003)

Functionalist approaches: prototypical properties

nouns are words that are typically used to refer, verbs are words that are typically used to predicate, adjectives are words that are typically used to modify (Croft (1991), Hengeveld (1992), Bhat (1994) quoted in Baker 2003)

Some Problems of prototypes. The approach is not vulnerable to the discovery of simple counter examples; hence it cannot make sharp predictions about the morphosyntax of lexical categories (Baker (2003)).

Example: hungerV hungryA, but

a. Chris hungers vs Chris *(is) hungry. b. a hungry person vs *a hunger person c. Chris hungered vs *Chris (was) hungried. d. Chris is as hungry as Pat vs *Chris is as hungers as Pat.

The question about lexical and functional parts of speech.

Traditionally: Lexical categories:

1. nouns - A noun is a word used to refer to people, animals, objects, substances, states, events, ideas and feelings. A noun functions as a subject or object of a verb and can be modified by an adjective;

2. verbs - A verb is used to show an action or a state of being

3. Adjectives - Adjectives are used to describe or specify a noun or pronoun;

4. Adverbs - is used to modify a verb, adjective and other adverbs. completely, never, there ...

5. Pronouns - A pronoun is used in the place of a noun or phrase;,

6. Numerals.

Functional categories:

1. articles – words that is used before a noun to show whether the noun refers to something specific or not;

2. conjunctions – words used to connect words, clauses, phrases, or sentences or to coordinate words in the same clause;

3. adpositions – prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in English, simply prepositions), are a class of words that express spatial or temporal relations (in, under, towards, before) or mark various semantic roles (of, for).

4. particles – function words that must be associated with another word or phrase to impart meaning, i.e., does not have its own lexical definition.

5. interjections - are used to show surprise or emotion.

Open and closed classes. Open classes are replenished and largely coincide with lexical parts of speech.

Closed classes cannot get new members and coincide functional categories.