Syntactic Categories

Lexical Categories Phrasal Categories

 Lexical Categories
Traditional definitions for parts of speech are
based on “notional” (i.e. semantic) properties

A noun is a word that names a person, place, or thing.

A verb is a word that names an action or event.
An adjective is a word that describes a state.

However, these characterizations fail to do

identification in some cases.
 The Task of Assigning Words to Syntactic
Categories
“Which words belong together in the same
class?”

“What name (or label) should be assigned to a

given word class?”
Example:

They are fools.

They are foolish.

a Modification by degree adverb vs. adjective:

They are utter fools. *They are very fools.
*They are utter foolish. They are very foolish.

b Inflection for number

fool fools
foolish *foolishes

c Comparative forms
fool *fooler/*more fool
foolish more foolish

d Occurrence as subject of a clause

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
*Foolish rush in where angels fear to tread.

(Yin be suud ne pang misi efek hilang uli slide)

Once the word classes in a particular language have been defined in this way, they can be assigned a label (Noun, Verb, etc.) based on universal
notional patterns.

Words that exhibit all of the defining grammatical properties associated with a particular class are said to be
prototypical members of that class.
The grammatical criteria used to identify word
classes should be thought of as diagnostic
features or “symptoms,” rather than
definitions.
 Phrasal Categories
In assigning phrase categories, there are two basic questions should be asked:

(i) how do we know whether two phrases belong to

the same or different categories?

(ii) how do we know what category label to assign to a

particular class of phrases?
(i) how do we know whether two phrases belong to
the same or different categories?

two phrases belong to the same category if they have the same grammatical properties.

Two basic types of evidence:

(ii) mutual substitutability (i.e. sameness of distribution)

The dog catches the cat

NP as Subject
The bird flies to the sky

(ii) sameness of internal structure.

Example:
Determiner The Book
Noun
(ii) how do we know what category label to assign to a
particular class of phrases?

Assigning labels to phrasal categories

Based on the HEAD

Example:
The Three Heroes
Head
How to Determine the Phrase’s Head?
First, the head of a phrase determines many of the grammatical features of the phrase as a whole.
Example:
a [The new rice] is in the barn.
b [The new kittens] are in the barn.

Second, the head may determine the number and type of other elements in the phrase.
Example:
a. I am [very grateful to you].
b. John felt [sorry for his actions].

Third, the head is more likely to be obligatory than the modifiers or other non-head elements.
Example:
a [The three little pigs] eat truffles.
b [The three pigs] eat truffles.
c [The pigs] eat truffles.
d [Pigs] eat truffles.
e *[The three little] eat truffles.
English noun phrases do not always contain a
head noun. This is called Ellipsis.

It is because the head is already “understood”

a [The third little pig] was smarter than [the second]

b [the good], [the bad] and [the ugly]

c [The rich] get richer and [the poor] get children

 not all lexical (word-level) categories can be heads of phrases.

a major categories (can function as heads of phrases)

• Noun (dog, tree, water, kindness, etc.)
• Verb (run, melt, hit, love, etc.)
• Adjective (big, red, friendly, impossible, etc.)
• Adverb (quickly, unexpectedly, fortunately, etc.)12
• Preposition (on, under, from, etc.)

b minor categories (do not normally function as heads of phrases)

• Conjunction (and, or, but, etc.)
• Interjection (oh, ah, well, ouch, etc.)
• Determiners: includes articles (a, the), demonstratives (this, that), and
• quantifiers (all, some, many, etc.)