Transcript Meeting 2 Word Classes

Word Classes
Lecture 1b
Syntax

Syntax is how words are put together to form
sentences.

There are many theories of syntax, with lots of
different terminologies. We will be using the
terminology used in the Grammar Survey and
in Fromkin et al.

We’ll mostly concentrate on English, although
we will make reference to other languages
Syntax
• Words belong to different classes or “parts-ofspeech”, like noun, verb or adjective.
Let’s look at the following three groups of words:
 Group 1: woman, table, dogs, morning, garden
 Group 2: walk, see, hit, write, listen
 Group 3: happy, blue, circular, big
• How do we know which word belongs in which
group or word class?
Notional vs Formal definitions
What is a noun?
‘a noun is a word that refers to a person,
place or thing’
What is a verb?
‘a verb is a doing word’ or ‘a verb is a word
that refers to an event or state’
What is an adjective?
'adjectives are words that refer to
properties of things’
Notional vs Formal definitions
These definitions are meaning-based and
are what are called notional definitions.
There are problems with notional
definitions.
Problems with notional definitions
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The explosion broke all the windows
The thirst was unbearable
Ponting took a great catch
We are expecting the train’s arrival
What sort of words are explosion, thirst,
catch and arrival in these sentences?
Problems with notional definitions
o We want to say that they are nouns like the words
in Group 1 (woman, table, dogs, morning, garden)
o But do they refer to ‘a person, place or thing’?
 an explosion is an event, not a thing
 thirst is a state of being, not a thing
 the arrival of the train is an event
 a catch could be an event, or may be a thing
Problems with notional definitions
Nouns can refer to a wide range of concepts:
 physical entities (table, chair, house, stone …)
 people (girl, uncle, daughter, student …)
 attributes (brightness, clarity, sadness …)
 mental states (confidence, love, meditation …)
 abstract entities (truth, individuality, ownership…)
 events (disappearance, arrival, explosion …)
Notional vs Formal definitions
Rather than relying on notional definitions,
linguists use formal properties to decide
whether a word is in a particular word
class or not
Words in the same word class behave the
same (are found in the same
environments, have the same grammatical
features).
Syntactic features
 Distributional or combinatorial features – the
position that a word occupies relative to the other
words it occurs with.
Example:
 Nouns combine with words like the, a, this and
my to form what is called a noun phrase: the dog,
an explosion, this class
 Adjectives combine with a following noun within
a noun phrase: the clever dog, a loud explosion
Morphological features
Associated grammatical categories
Some words have variable forms which express
special types of meaning or which depend on a
relationship with other elements in a phrase or
sentence.
Example:
 English nouns can get a final -s to show that
there’s more than one of them (the grammatical
category of ‘number’) dog/dogs, walk/walks
 verbs can get a final -ed to show that the event
happened in the past (the grammatical category
of ‘tense’) walk/walked, paint/painted
Morphological features
 Most English pronouns have variable forms.
 The choice of form depends on the relationship
between the pronoun and other words:
 I saw him, He saw me (*Me saw he, *Him saw I)
 In Latin, most nouns have variable forms:
 Agricola nautam vidit. The farmer saw the sailor
 Nauta agricolam vidit.The sailor saw the farmer.
Formal definitions
Formal definitions are less problematic
than notional ones.
If a word behaves in a particular way, it
belongs in the same word class as all the
other words which behave in the same
way.
Note:
• Some English words with the same form and
similar meanings can be in different classes.
Example:
There are two words catch in English :
 Good cricketers always catch the ball.
 Ricky Ponting took a great catch.
These words have different formal properties:
 they catch, they caught, they are catching
 a great catch, several great catches.
Another example
The students find the work difficult
 find is a verb
The archaeologists made several finds
find is a noun
Open word classes
We can divide words into two classes open and closed classes.
The open word classes are ‘open’ in the
sense that new words can be added into
these classes.
Words in open word classes are often
referred to as content words.
Nouns
• Nouns make up one of the most important
word classes in English.
• This class includes words like: cat, dog,
house, arrival, disappearance, John,
Mary, Brisbane, linguistics, university,
student
Morphological property of nouns
• In English, many nouns have different forms depending on
whether they refer to just one of the items, or more than one.
Examples:
 cat ~ cats, dog ~ dogs, horse ~ horses
 child ~ children, goose ~ geese
• The subclass of nouns that vary in this way are called count
nouns.
• Mass nouns (sugar, snow, chalk, rice)
• Proper nouns (Peter, Brisbane, Queensland)
Syntactic properties of nouns
• Nouns can occur alone in the context: DETV ____
• DETV is the abbreviation for determinative
• Determinatives include words like the, a, this, these, some
Examples:
 the book, an apple, those elephants, some sugar
• The nouns which can occur in this context are the common
nouns (mass nouns and count nouns).
• Proper nouns in English do not (usually) occur with articles
a/the (*the Samantha, *a/the Brisbane)
Syntactic properties of nouns
All nouns can occur alone in the context:
(DETV) ____ VERB
o The parentheses mean that what it contains is
optional.
Examples:
 The cat smells, John smokes, Water freezes,
Doors open
Lexical verbs
• Lexical verbs make up a large open class
• There are many lexical verbs in English
(which we’ll discuss in detail in week 4).
• Lexical verbs include words like go, come,
take, run, walk, read, write, think, cook,
eat, understand, and arrive.
Morphological property of lexical verbs
Lexical verbs have an -ing form, an -s form,
and a past tense form (at least).
Example:
the verb eat has forms eating, eats and ate
Many lexical verbs (but not all) have a form in -ed
(as in walked) or a form in -en (as in eaten).
Syntactic property of lexical verbs
Lexical verbs can occur alone in the context:
 MODAL NP ____
where MODAL is a type of auxiliary verb (which
will be discussed shortly) like can, must, will;
and NP stands for noun phrase (which we will
look at in Week 2) e.g., the book, John, some
sugar, cats, a big elephant.
Syntactic property of lexical verbs
MODAL NP ____ ?
Examples:
 Must you go?
 Can he stay?
 Should we hyphenate?
 Will the horses eat?
 Should the students leave?
Adjectives
• Adjectives include words like big, small,
large, heavy, interesting, expensive and
fast
Example: a fast car, the expensive coat
Morphological properties of adjectives
• Many adjectives inflect for grade.
• Most adjectives with only one or two syllables
can take the suffixes -er and -est to form the
comparative (‘more’) and superlative (‘most’).
Examples:
 great ~ greater ~ greatest
 happy ~ happier ~ happiest
NOTE: Many adverbs also have this property
Morphological properties of adjectives
• Most adjectives can take the suffix -ly to form an adverb.
Examples:
 quick ~ quickly, ready ~ readily, beautiful ~ beautifully, unconstitutional
~ unconstitutionally
• The first member of these pairs is an adjective
• The second is an adverb.
NOTE:
• This -ly must not be confused with the -ly that forms
adjectives from nouns:

man ~ manly, cost ~ costly, friend ~ friendly, love ~ lovely
Syntactic property of adjectives
Adjectives can occur alone in the context:
 (DETV) NOUN is ____
Nearly all adjectives (and mass nouns) can occur in
this position
Examples:
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This car is green
Peter is hungry
A lion is dangerous
My neighbour is happy
Syntactic property of adjectives
Most adjectives can occur in the context
DETV ____ NOUN
Examples:
 the big elephant, a fast car, a dangerous lion
However, some nouns can also occur in this position.
Examples:
 the police car, the kitchen floor
A syntactic test which does distinguish
adjectives from nouns is:
DETV ADJ NOUN
* DETV NOUN ADJ
Examples:
 a beautiful baby (*a baby beautiful)
 the fantastic film (*the film fantastic)
 this yummy meal (*this meal yummy)
A noun can precede or follow another
noun
DETV NOUN NOUN
Examples:
 A corporation law
 A law corporation
 A prayer meeting
 A morning prayer
Adverbs
• Adverbs are words like quickly, slowly,
fortunately and fast (e.g., She ran fast).
• Degree adverbs form a subclass of
adverbs which combine with adjectives or
other adverbs
Examples: very, rather, extremely and quite.
very nice, rather handsome, quite slowly
Morphological property of adverbs

Many adverbs have the form adjective +ly, as in happily, quickly,
beautifully, amazingly

Not all words ending in -ly are adverbs; when added to a noun, -ly
forms an adjective, as in costly, heavenly, manly, womanly, friendly…

Some adverbs have no distinctive ending (and no related adjective),
e.g., soon, just, very, less, well, worse.

Don’t rely on the traditional formal definition that “adverbs end in –ly”,
this is not always the case.
Syntactic property of adverbs
• Most adverbs can appear alone in the context:
NP VERB NP ____
Examples:
 The boys finished the job quickly
 She did the job badly/well.
OPEN WORD CLASSES
noun
lexical verb
adjective
adverb
Closed word classes
 Closed word classes are ‘closed’ in that they do
not easily accept new members, and most of
them are quite small, so that it is possible to
exhaustively list all the members of the class.
 Unlike with the open word classes, there is often
variation in the terms and classifications used in
talking about closed word classes, and different
languages have different closed word classes.
Closed class words:
 Pronouns
 Determinatives/determiner
 Prepositions
 Auxiliary Verbs
 Coordinators / conjunctions
 Subordinators / complementisers
Pronouns
We will talk about three different types of pronouns:
 personal pronouns
 interrogative pronouns
 relative pronouns.
(Traditional grammar also talks about demonstrative
pronouns and indefinite pronouns, but we will not use
these terms.)
Personal pronouns
Personal pronouns have different forms for:
 person (first, second, third): I, you, he/she
 number (singular, plural): I, we
 case (nominative, accusative, dependent
genitive, independent genitive and reflexive): I,
me, my, mine, myself
o The forms of the personal pronouns in standard English
are listed on page 5 of your lecture notes 1B.
Interrogative pronouns
• Interrogative pronouns:
• who, whose, whom for humans
• what for non-humans
• We use these forms to ask about
someone or something:
 Who said that? What happened? Whose
book?
Relative pronouns
• Relative pronouns are used within a noun
phrase in constructions like:
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the woman who took the car
the woman whose book you borrowed
the man whom you interviewed
the tree which fell
a pub where we met
that time when you fainted
one reason why they left
Determinatives/determiners
 Determinatives usually indicate whether the
speaker has a particular individual in mind or
whether they assume that the addressee can –
or cannot – identify what is being referred to:
 the, this, each, every, a, some, any …
• The most important members of the class of
determinatives are the (definite article) and
a/an (indefinite article).
Syntactic property of Determinatives
• Determinatives occur as the first word in a noun
phrase:
 the happy boy
 those new books
 a dirty face
 some fast cars
 many new books
 several unhappy people
 various brave and hearty students
Types of Determinatives
• There are quite a few determinatives, and they
can be sub-classified according to the kinds of
meanings they express.
• The major determinatives are:
o Article: the, a, an
 The student came to class.
o Demonstrative: this, these, that, those
 That student came to class.
More Determinatives
Universal: all, both
 Both students came to class.
Distributive: each, every
 Every student came to class.
Existential: some, any
 Some students came to class.
Cardinal numerals: one, two, three, etc.
 Three students came to class.
Determinatives
Disjunctive: either, neither
 Neither student came to class.
Negative: no
 No student came to class.
Additive: another
 Another student came to class.
Degree: many, more, few, little
 Few students came to class.
Sufficiency: enough, sufficient
 Enough students came to class.
Prepositions
 Traditionally, the notional definition of prepositions has to
do with space and time, and the traditional formal
definition is that it occurs before a noun phrase:
 in the box, on the sofa, at 3 o’clock, before dawn
 Prepositions in English are morphologically invariable
(that is, they do not change form). This means we’ll have
to concentrate on their syntactic properties to define
them.
Syntactic Properties of Prepositions
• ____ NP
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He was standing outside the house
The horse jumped over the fence
He ran from the burning building.
Joseph came after the party.
• Some prepositions can stand alone without a
following NP
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He was standing outside
The horse jumped over
Joseph came after
* He ran from
Syntactic Properties of Prepositions
 Some prepositions precede other prepositions:
 ____ P + NP
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He crawled out from behind the sofa
He looked over from the house
She took it off of the table. (American English)
She threw it out of the window.
She stole it from under his nose.
Syntactic Properties of Prepositions
Most prepositions can be modified by right
Examples:
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He was standing RIGHT outside the house
The horse jumped RIGHT over the fence
He ran RIGHT from the burning building.
Joseph came RIGHT after the party.
Prepositions
Prepositions can occur in a variety of contexts:
 before noun phrases:
 I went to the shops
 on their own:
 I went outside
 before another preposition:
 I went out through the window
NOTE:
The Grammar Survey also classifies as
preposition words which are preposed to a
clause (or sentence-like element):
 He arrived before/after the train had left.
Auxiliary Verbs
• Auxiliary verbs (often just called auxiliaries) occur in a sentence in
addition to a lexical verb. We use them to indicate various
grammatical categories, such as aspect, mood and voice. We will
talk about them much more in future lectures, but they can be subclassified as:

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
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Modal verbs: will, would, can, could, shall, should, may, might, must
Perfect auxiliary: have
Progressive auxiliary: be
Passive auxiliary: be
Do-support auxiliary: do
Note that the verbs have and do are both auxiliaries and also lexical
verbs, depending on their use.
Coordinators
In English, we have three main coordinators:
 and, but and or.
These usually coordinate elements that are
grammatically alike — clauses (John got up but
he didn’t leave), noun phrases (the man or
his dog), verb phrases (he came in and sat down),
nouns (the knives and forks) ….
Subordinators/ Complementisers
• Another class of invariant words: that, for,
whether, to, if.
___ CLAUSE
Examples:
 I know that he is here
 I wonder whether he knows the answer
 I asked Mary if she had eaten her lunch
 I arranged for John to stay
Further reading:
Grammar survey pp1-3.
(Chapters 3 and 5 are also relevant, but you
may not be able to understand those
chapters fully until later in the course, so
you may want to wait until then to read
them.)