Chapter 2 Parts of Speech

Chapter 2: Parts of Speech Parts of speech/Syntactic category/word class Distribution: parts of speech are determined based on their distribution Morphological: what afÏxes are found on the word Derivational morphemes: afÏxes that make words out of other words Inflectional: change tense, number but not type of word Syntactic: what other words are nearby Nouns -appear after determiners like ‘the’ -appear after adjectives -can follow prepositions (in school) -can appear as the subject or direct object of a sentence -can be regarded as no (no apples were…) -if you can replace a word with another common noun, then that word is a noun Verbs -can follow auxillaries and the non-finite marker ‘to’ -can follow subjects, adverbs -can be negated with ‘not’ Adjectives -can be inflected into their comparative and superlative form (-er, -est) -negated using the prefix un-appear between determiners and nouns and follow auxillaries -can be modified by the adverb ‘very’ Adverbs -generally don’t take inflectional sufÏxes -can’t appear between determiners and nouns or after the verb ‘is’ and its variants Complementary distribution: 2 categories that never appear in the same environment (adverbs and adjectives) Open class: parts of speech that can take new members; N, V, Adv, Adj Closed class: parts of speech that don’t take new members; D, P, Conj, C, T, Neg, etc Lexical: parts of speech that provide the content of the sentence Functional: parts of speech that provide grammatical information Prepositions: appear before nouns/NP -to, from, under, over, with, by, at, above, before, through, near, on, off, for, in, into, of, during, across, without, since, until Determiners: appear at the beginning of NP -Articles: the, a, an -Deictic articles: this, that, these, those, yon -Quantifiers: every, some, many, most, few, all, each, any, less, fewer, no -Cardinal numerals: one, two, etc -Possessive pronouns: my, your, his, her, its, our, their -Wh-question words: which, whose Conjunctions: connect 2 or more phrases together on an equal level -and, or, nor, neither Complementizers: connects structures together but they embed one clause inside of another -that, for, if, whether Tense: auxiliaries, modals, non finite tense marker ‘to’ Negation: ‘not’ Subcategories of Nouns -Plurality: singular (requires a determiner) vs. plural -Count (take ‘many’; require a determiner; represent individual countable elements) vs. mass (‘much’; can’t be counted – like water) -Proper names (Julia; resist determiners) vs. common names -Anaphors are a type of pronoun vs. Pronouns (not a type of anaphor) Subcategories of Verbs -tense/finiteness (left, leave, to leave, will leave, leaves) -Argument structure: the number of arguments that a predicate takes -Predicate: defines the relation between the individuals being talked about and the real world -Arguments: entities participating in the relation -Valency: the number of arguments a predicate takes -Intransitive: predicate that takes only one argument (no arguments follow the verb) -Transitive: predicate that takes 2 arguments (single argument after the verb) -Ditransitive: takes 3 arguments (2 arguments after the verb)