Syntax (eBook)

A Generative Introduction

Andrew Carnie (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2012 | 3. Auflage
448 Seiten
Wiley (Verlag)
978-1-118-32187-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Andrew Carnie’s bestselling textbook on syntax has guided thousands of students through the discipline of theoretical syntax; retaining its popularity due to its combination of straightforward language, comprehensive coverage, and numerous exercises. In this third edition, topics have been updated, new exercises added, and the online resources have been expanded.

• Supported by expanded online student and instructor resources, including extra chapters on HPSG,  LFG and time-saving materials for lecturers, including problem sets, PowerPoint slides, and an instructors’ manual
• Features new chapters on ellipsis, auxiliaries, and non-configurational languages
• Covers topics including phrase structure, the lexicon, Case theory, movement, covert movement, locality conditions, VP shells, and control
• Accompanied by a new optional workbook, available separately, of sample problem sets which are designed to give students greater experience of analyzing syntactic structure

Andrew Carnie is Professor of Linguistics and Faculty Director in the Graduate College at the University of Arizona. He specializes in generative syntactic theory with an emphasis on constituency, VSO languages, copular constructions and the Celtic Languages. He is the author of numerous other publications, including Irish Nouns (2008), Constituent Structure (2010), Formal Approaches to Celtic Linguistics (2011), Modern Syntax (2011), and The Syntax Workbook: A Companion to Carnie’s Syntax (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Autor

Andrew Carnie is Professor of Linguistics and Faculty Director in the Graduate College at the University of Arizona. He specializes in generative syntactic theory with an emphasis on constituency, VSO languages, copular constructions and Celtic languages. He is the author of numerous other publications, including Irish Nouns (2008), Constituent Structure (2010), Formal Approaches to Celtic Linguistics (2011), Modern Syntax (2011), and The Syntax Workbook: A Companion to Carnie's Syntax (2012).

Rezensionen

"Deeply informed, lucid and careful, this revision of the
outstanding original carries the student from core concepts to
topics at the borders of inquiry. A most valuable
contribution." - Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor
(retired), Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT

"This truly excellent textbook competently guides students to
understand not just the basics of generative syntax but also
richness of universals and parametric variation in a clear and
thought-provoking way." - Ken Hiraiwa, Department of
English, Meiji Gakuin University

Textauszug

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)    a) The man loved peanut butter cookies.

b) The puppy loved peanut butter cookies.

c) The king loved peanut butter cookies.

However, we cannot substitute words that aren’t nouns:1

2)    a) *The green loved peanut butter cookies.

b) *The in loved peanut butter cookies.

c) *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)   a) [John] went to the store.

b) [The man] went to the store.

c) *[Quickly walks] went to the store.

4)    a) [Norvel] kissed the Blarney stone.

b) *[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)    a) Sincerity is an important quality.

b) the assassination of the president

c) 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 small (one) is chasing the dog.”

In this sentence, we have a thing we’d normally call an adjective (the word wita “small”) functioning like a noun (e.g., taking subject marking). Is this a noun or an adjective?

It’s worth noting that some parts of speech don’t lend themselves to semantic definitions at all. Consider the sentence in (9). What is the meaning of the word that?

9) Mikaela said that parts of speech intrigued her.

If parts of speech are based on the meaning of the word, how can we assign a part of speech to a word for which the meaning isn’t clear?2

Perhaps the most striking evidence that we can’t use semantic definitions for parts of speech comes from the fact that you can know the part of speech of a word without even knowing what it means:

10) The yinkish dripner blorked quastofically into the nindin with the pidibs.

Every native speaker of English will tell you that yinkish is an adjective, dripner a noun, blorked a verb, quastofically an adverb, and nindin and pidibs both nouns, but they’d be very hard pressed to tell you what these words actually mean. How then can you know the part of speech of a word without knowing its meaning? The answer is simple: The various parts of speech are not semantically defined. Instead they depend on where the words appear in the sentence and what kinds of affixes they take. Nouns are things that appear in “noun positions” and take “noun suffixes” (endings). The same is true for verbs, adjectives, etc. Here are the criteria that we used to determine the parts of speech in sentence (10):

11)

a)

yinkish

between the and a noun takes -ish adjective ending

b)

dripner

after an adjective (and the) takes -er noun ending subject of the sentence

c)

blorked

after subject noun takes -ed verb ending

d)

quastofically

after a verb takes -ly adverb ending

e)

nindin

after the and after a preposition

f)

pidibs

after the and after a preposition takes -s noun plural ending

The part of speech of a word is determined by its place in the sentence and by its morphology, not by its meaning. In the next section, there is a list of rules and distributional criteria that you can use to determine the part of speech of a word.

1.2 Distributional Criteria

The criteria we use for determining part of speech then aren’t based on the meanings of the word, but on its distribution. We will use two kinds of distributional tests for determining part of speech: morphological distribution and syntactic distribution.

First we look at morphological distribution; this refers to the kinds of affixes (prefixes and suffixes) and other morphology that appear on a word. Let’s consider two different types of affixes. First, we have affixes that make words out of other words. We call these affixes derivational morphemes. These suffixes usually result in a different part of speech from the word they attach to. For example, if we take the word distribute we can add the derivational suffix -(t)ion and we get the noun distribution. The -(t)ion affix thus creates nouns. Any word ending in -(t)ion is a noun. This is an example of a morphological distribution. A similar example is found with the affix -al, which creates adjectives. If we take distribution, and add -al to it, we get the adjective distributional. The -al...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 20.8.2012
• Reihe/Serie: Introducing Linguistics
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Schulbuch / Wörterbuch ► Wörterbuch / Fremdsprachen
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Sprachwissenschaft
• Schlagworte: Linguistics • Linguistik • Sprachwissenschaften • Syntax • Theoretical Linguistics • Theoretische Linguistik
• ISBN-10: 1-118-32187-1 / 1118321871
• ISBN-13: 978-1-118-32187-4 / 9781118321874