forgive the simplification.20 20. For more on the phenomena discussed here, see Bjorkman (2017) and Konnelly and Cowper (2016).
21 21. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002180.html.
22 22. Thanks to Ahmad Lotfi for suggesting this part of the question.
23 23. This problem set was inspired by a discussion on a Facebook post by Gary Thoms.
24 24. This problem set is thanks to Matt Pearson.
25 25. The intended meaning for (iii) and (iv) is “Who is the person such that it is obvious that Tasha likes that person?” or “It’s obvious that Tasha likes somebody. Who is that somebody?”.
Chapter 2
Parts of Speech
Learning Objectives
After reading chapter 2, you should walk away having mastered the following ideas and skills:
1 Distinguish between distributional and semantic definitions of parts of speech.
2 Identify a part of speech by its distribution.
3 Identify cases of complementary distribution.
4 Know the difference between an open-class and a closed-class part of speech.
5 Explain the difference between lexical and functional categories.
6 Identify different subcategories using feature notations.
7 Identify plural nouns, mass nouns, and count nouns and distinguish them with features.
8 Explain the difference between predicates and arguments.
9 Categorize verbs according to their argument structure (intransitive, transitive, ditransitive) and represent this using features.
0. WORDS AND WHY THEY MATTER TO SYNTAX
It goes without saying that sentences are made up of words, so before we get into the syntactic meat of this book, it’s worth looking carefully at different kinds of words.
What is most important to us here is the word’s part of speech (also known as syntactic category or word class). The most common parts of speech are nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions (we will also look at some other, less familiar parts of speech below). Parts of speech tell us how a word is going to function in the sentence. Consider the sentences in (1). Notice that we can substitute various words that are of the type noun for the second word in the sentence:
1)
1 The woman loved peanut butter cookies.
2 The puppy loved peanut butter cookies.
3 The queen loved peanut butter cookies.
However, we cannot substitute words that aren’t nouns:1
2)
1 *The green loved peanut butter cookies.
2 *The in loved peanut butter cookies.
3 *The sing loved peanut butter cookies.
The same holds true for larger groups of words (the square brackets […] mark off the relevant groups of words).
3)
1 [Moises] went to the store.
2 [The man] went to the store.
3 *[Quickly walks] went to the store.
4)
1 [Norvel] kissed the Blarney stone.
2 *[To the washroom] kissed the Blarney stone.
If we have categories for words that can appear in certain positions and categories for those that don’t, we can make generalizations (scientific ones) about the behavior of different word types. This is why we need parts of speech in syntactic theory.
1. DETERMINING PART OF SPEECH
1.1 The Problem of Traditional Definitions
If you were taught any grammar in school, you may have been told that a noun is a “person, place, or thing”, or that a verb is “an action, state, or state of being”. Alas, this is a very over-simplistic way to characterize various parts of speech. It also isn’t terribly scientific or accurate. The first thing to notice about definitions like this is that they are based on semantic criteria. It doesn’t take much effort to find counterexamples to these semantic definitions. Consider the following:
5) The destruction of the city bothered the Mongols.
The meaning of destruction is not a “person, place, or thing”. It is an action. By semantic criteria, this word should be a verb. But in fact, native speakers unanimously identify it as a noun. Similar cases are seen in (6):
6)
1 Sincerity is an important quality.
2 the assassination of the president
3 Tucson is a great place to live.
Sincerity is an attribute, a property normally associated with adjectives. Yet in (6a), sincerity is a noun. Similarly in (6b) assassination, an action, is functioning as a noun. (6c) is more subtle. The semantic property of identifying a location is usually attributed to a preposition; in (6c) however, the noun Tucson refers to a location, but isn’t itself a preposition. It thus seems difficult (if not impossible) to rigorously define the parts of speech based solely on semantic criteria. This is made even clearer when we see that a word can change its part of speech depending upon where it appears in a sentence:
7)
| a) | Gabrielle’s mother is an axe-murderer. | (N) |
| b) | Anteaters mother attractive offspring. | (V) |
| c) | Wendy’s mother country is Iceland. | (Adj) |
The situation gets even muddier when we consider languages other than English. Consider the following data from Warlpiri:
8) Wita-ngku ka maliki wajilipinyi.
small-SUBJ AUX dog chase.PRES
“The
