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In this chapter, we’ve surveyed the parts of speech categories that we will use in this book. We have the lexical parts of speech N, V, Adj, and Adv, and the functional categories D, P, C, Conj, Neg, and T. Determining part of speech is done not by traditional semantic criteria, but by using morphological and syntactic distribution tests. We also looked at distributional evidence for various subcategories of nouns and verbs, and represented these distinctions as feature notations on the major categories.

IDEAS, RULES, AND CONSTRAINTS INTRODUCED IN THIS CHAPTER

1 Parts of Speech(a.k.a. Word Class, Syntactic Categories): The labels we give to constituents (N, V, Adj, Adv, D, P, C, T, Neg, Conj). These determine the position of the word in the sentence.

2 Distribution: Parts of speech are determined based on their distribution. We have both morphological distribution (what affixes are found on the word) and syntactic distribution (what other words are nearby).

3 Complementary Distribution: When you have two categories and they never appear in the same environment (context), you have complementary distribution. Typically complementary distribution means that the two categories are subtypes of a larger class.

4 Parts of speech that are Open Class can take new members or coinages: N, V, Adj, Adv.

5 Parts of speech that are Closed Class don’t allow new coinages: D, P, Conj, C, T, Neg, and the pronoun and anaphor subcategories of N.

6 Lexical Categories express the content of the sentence. N (including pronouns), V, Adj, Adv.

7 Functional Categories contain the grammatical information in a sentence: D, P, Conj, T, Neg, C.

8 Subcategories: The major parts of speech can often be divided up into subtypes. These are called subcategories.

9 Feature Notations on major categories are a mechanism for indicating subcategories.

10 Plurality refers to the number of nouns. It is usually indicated in English with an -s suffix. Plural nouns in English do not require a determiner.

11 Count vs. Mass: Count nouns can appear with determiners and the quantifier many. Mass nouns appear with much and usually don’t have articles.

12 The Predicate defines the relation between the individuals being talked about and some fact about them, as well as relations among the arguments.

13 Argument Structure: The number of arguments that a predicate takes.

14 The Arguments are the entities that are participating in the predicate relation.

15 Intransitive: A predicate that takes only one argument.

16 Transitive: A predicate that takes two arguments.

17 Ditransitive: A predicate that takes three arguments.

FURTHER READING: Baker (2003), Grimshaw (1990), Harley (2006), Katamba (2004), Levin (1993), Williams (1983)

GENERAL PROBLEM SETS

GPS1. NOUNS

[Application of Skills; Basic]

Identify all the nouns in the following passage from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.¹² You can ignore pronouns like I, he, my, whom, her, and me – although these are, of course, nouns as well.

The lamps had been lit, but the blinds had not been drawn, so that I could see Holmes as he lay upon the couch. I do not know whether he was seized with compunction at that moment for the part he was playing, but I know that I never felt more heartily ashamed of myself in my life than when I saw the beautiful creature against whom I was conspiring, or the grace and kindliness with which she waited upon the injured man. And yet it would be the blackest treachery to Holmes to draw back now from the part which he had entrusted to me. I hardened my heart, and took the smoke-rocket from under my ulster. After all, I thought, we are not injuring her. We are but preventing her from injuring another.

GPS2. VERBS

[Application of Skills; Basic]

Using the passage above in question 1, identify all the verbs. Do not worry about modals and auxiliary verbs. So ignore had, been, could, do, was, would, be, and are (all of which are of category T).

GPS3. ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS

[Application of Skills; Basic]

Using the passage above in question 1, identify all the adjectives and adverbs.

GPS4. PREPOSITIONS

[Application of Skills; Basic]

Using the passage above in question 1, identify all the prepositions.

GPS5. PART OF SPEECH 1 ¹³

[Application of Skills; Basic]

Identify the main parts of speech (i.e., Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives/Adverbs, and Prepositions) in the following sentences. Treat hyphenated words as single words:

1 The old rusty pot-belly stove has been replaced.

2 The red-haired assistant put the vital documents through the new efficient shredder.

3 The large evil leathery alligator complained to her aging keeper about her extremely unattractive description.

4 I just ate the last piece of chocolate cake.

GPS6. NOOTKA

[Application of Skills; Intermediate]

Consider the following data from Nootka (data from Sapir and Swadesh 1939), a language spoken in British Columbia, Canada, and answer the questions that follow.

a) Mamu:k-ma qu:ʔas-ʔi.

working-PRES man-DEF

“The man is working.”

b) Qu:ʔas-ma mamu:k-ʔi.

man-PRES working-DEF

“The working one is a man.”

(The: mark indicates a long vowel. ʔ is a glottal stop. PRES in the second line means “present tense”, DEF means “definite determiner” (the).)

Questions about Nootka:

1 In sentence a, is Qu:ʔas functioning as a verb or a noun?

2 In sentence a, is Mamu:k functioning as a verb or a noun?

3 In sentence b, is Qu:ʔas a verb or a noun?

4 In sentence b, is Mamu:k a verb or a noun?

5 What criteria did you use to tell what is a noun in Nootka and what is a verb?

6 How does this data support the idea that there are no semantic criteria involved in determining the part of speech?

GPS7. GENDER NEUTRAL PRONOUNS

[Creative and Critical Thinking; Basic]

Most standard varieties of English don’t have a gender-neutral singular pronoun that can refer to humans (other than the very awkward “one”). There have been numerous attempts to introduce gender-neutral singular human pronouns into English. The following list is a subset of the ones found on John Chao’s gender-neutral pronoun FAQ:¹⁴

ae, ar, co, e, em, ems, en, es, et, ey, fm, ha, hann, he’er, heesh, heir, hem, her’n, herim, herm, hes, hesh, heshe, hey, hez, hi, himer, hir, hirem, hires, hirm, his’er, his’n, hisher, hizer, ho, hom, hse, hymer, im, ip, ir, iro, jhe, le, lem, na, ne, ner, nim, on, per, po, rim, s/he, sap, se, sem, ser, sheehy, shem, shey, shim, sie, sim, ta, tem, term, tey, thim, thon, uh, ve, vim, vir, vis, xe, z, ze, zie, zim, zir.

None of these have caught on. Instead, the otherwise plural they/them/their/themselves is usually felt to be more natural by native speakers. Why have the above forms not caught on, but instead we have co-opted a plural pronoun for this usage?

GPS8. FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES

[Application of Skills; Basic]

The following is an extract from the preface to Captain Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) (from the open source Gutenberg project):

The propriety of introducing the university slang will be readily admitted; it is not less curious than that of the College in the Old Bailey, and is less generally understood. When the number and accuracy of our additions are compared with the price of the volume, we have no doubt that its editors will meet with the encouragement that is due to learning, modesty, and virtue.

For every word in this paragraph identify its part of speech, and mark whether each part of speech is a lexical or functional part of speech and whether the part of speech is open or closed.

GPS9. FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES

[Creative and Critical Thinking; Intermediate]

Interjections are functional items, in that they express a grammatical notion (such as the speaker’s agreement or attitude with respect to the thing being said), but are they closed class? Is it possible to make up new interjections?

GPS10. PART OF SPEECH 2

[Application of Skills; Intermediate]

Consider the following selection from Jabberwocky, a poem by Lewis Carroll (From

Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872):

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:

Long time the manxome foe he sought – So rested he by the Tumtum tree

And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came.

For each underlined word, indicate its part of speech (word class), and for Ns, Vs, Adjs, and Advs, explain the distributional criteria by which you came up with that classification. If the item is a closed class part of speech, indicate that. Do not try to use a dictionary. Most of these words are nonsense words. You will need to figure out what part of speech they are according to what suffixes and prefixes they take, along with where they appear relative to other words.

GPS11. SUBCATEGORIES OF NOUNS

[Application of Knowledge; Basic]

For each of the nouns below put a + sign in the box under the features that they have. Note that some nouns might have a plus value for more than one feature. The first one is done for you. Do not mark the minus (–) values, or the values for which the word is not specified; mark only the plus values!

Noun	PLURAL	COUNT	PROPER	PRONOUN	ANAPHOR
Cats	+	+
Milk
New York
They
people
language
printer
himself
wind
lightbulb

GPS12. SUBCATEGORIES OF VERBS

[Application of Knowledge; Intermediate]

For each of the verbs below, list whether it is intransitive, transitive or ditransitive and list which features it takes (see the list in (32) as an example). In some cases they may allow more than one feature (e.g., the verb eat is both [NP NP] and [NP]). Give an example for each feature:

spray, sleep, escape, throw, wipe, say, think, begrudge (or grudge), thank, pour, send, promise, kiss, arrive

CHALLENGE PROBLEM SETS

CPS1. -IAN AND -ISH

[Critical and Creative Thinking; Challenge]

In the text we claimed that the suffixes -ian and -ish mark adjectives. Consider the following sentences:

1 The Canadian government uses a parliamentary system of democracy.

2 The Canadian bought herself a barbeque.

3 The prudish linguist didn’t enjoy looking at the internet.

4 We keep those censored copies of the book hidden to protect the sensibilities of the prudish.

What should we make the words ending in -ish and -ian in sentences (b) and (d)? Are they adjectives? If not, how can we account for the fact that these words end in -ish and - ian? There are many possible answers to this question.

CPS2. NOMINAL PRENOMINAL MODIFIERS ¹⁵

[Critical and Creative Thinking; Challenge]

Part 1: By the syntactic distributional criteria given to you in the text, what part of speech should the underlined words in the following examples be?

1 the leather couch

2 the water spout

Part 2: By contrast, what do the following facts tell us about the parts of speech of leather

and water?

1 the leather

2 the water

3 ?the very leather couch (cf. the very red couch)

4 ?the very water spout (cf. the very big spout)

5 *The more leather couch/*The leatherer couch (cf. the bigger couch)

6 *The more water spout

7 *The waterest spout

CPS3. MOHAWK INCORPORATION ¹⁶

[Data Analysis; Challenge]

Part 1: Consider the following sentence from Mohawk, an Iroquoian language of North America. Based on this very limited data what parts of speech are rak and ’neróhkw

1) Ka-rak-ʌ́-hne’ thíkʌ o-’neróhkw-a’.

NEUT-be.white-PRES-STAT that NEUT-box-NOMINALIZER

“That box is white.”

(NEUT stands for Neuter gender, PRES stands for present tense; STAT stands for stative aspect. Gender typically appears on nouns but can also appear on verbs, tense and aspect typically appear on verbs.)

Part 2: Now consider this sentence where the morpheme meaning box has been “incorporated” into the same word as rak. This is a common morphological process in the language (see chapter 18 for more details on this phenomenon)

2) Ka-’neróhkwa-rak-ʌ́-hne’ thíkʌ.

NEUT-box-be.white-PRES-STAT that

“That box is white.”

What part of speech is ’neróhkwa in this sentence? Does it even make sense to talk about this word having a part of speech? Why or why not? Explain your answer.

CPS4: INTENSIFIERS

[Application of Knowledge; Challenge]

English has a subcategory of adverbs called intensifiers. This class includes very, rather, too (when used before an adjective), quite, less, nearly, partly, fully, mostly, and sometimes.

Question 1: Is this subcategory an open class part of speech or a closed class part of speech? Explain your answer.

Question 2: Describe the distribution of this subcategory. In particular describe where it can appear relative to other adverbs (and adjectives). Can other adverbs appear in this environment?

CPS5. COMPLEMENTARY DISTRIBUTION

[Critical Thinking; Challenge]

In a grey textbox in section 2.4, it’s argued that adjectives and adverbs are in complementary distribution and thus might be part of the same super-category A. Are N and V in complementary distribution? What about Adv and V? What about N and Adj? Create examples to show whether these categories are in complementary distribution. If any are in complementary distribution with the others what does this tell us about the parts of speech? Next consider whether any functional categories are in complementary distribution with lexical categories.

CPS6. SUBCATEGORIES OF ADVERBS

[Application of Skills and Knowledge; Challenge]

Your goal in this problem set is to develop a set of subcategories for adverbs. Consider the following adverbs. When doing these tests don’t put any extra stress or focus on the adverb – try to say the sentence naturally without emphasizing the adverbs. Also, don’t put extra pauses before or after any of the adverbs.

luckily, earnestly, intently, hopefully, probably, certainly, frequently, patiently, always, completely, almost, again, evidently, frankly, demandingly, yesterday, necessarily

Part 1: For each adverb determine:

1 Can it appear before the subject? (e.g., Unbelievably, I don’t know any pixies.)

2 Can it appear between the T (e.g., will, have, is, can) and the verb? (e.g., I have often wondered about the existence of pixies.)

3 Can it appear after the object? Or at the end of the sentence? (e.g., Pixies eat mushrooms vigorously.)

4 Can it appear between an object and a PP in a ditransitive (e.g., I put the book carefully

on the table.)

(Note: these adverbs may appear in several of these positions.)

Part 2: Group the adverbs together into subcategories based on your answers to part 1.

Part 3: Within each group you may find more subtle orderings. For example, within the subcategory of adverbs that can appear between auxiliaries and verbs there may be an ordering of adverbs. Try putting multiple adverbs in each position. What are the orderings you find?

CPS7. SUBCATEGORIES OF ADJECTIVES

[Application of Knowledge; Challenge]

Just as there are positional differences among adverbs (see Challenge Problem Set 6), we find an ordering of adjectives with respect to each other. Below is a list of adjectives. Pair each adjective with every other adjective and see which must come first in a noun phrase. Try to come up with a general ordering among these adjectives. (Although in the text I’ve told you to include numerals with the class of determiners, I’ve listed them here as adjectives. For the rest of the book treat them as determiners.)

big, young, blue, desperate, two, scaly, thick

One word of caution: it is sometimes possible to put some adjectives in any order. However, many of these orders are only possible if you are using the adjective contrastively or emphatically. For example, you can say the old rubber sneaker with a normal non-contrastive meaning, but the rubber old sneaker is only possible when it has a contrastive emphatic meaning (the RUBBER old sneaker as opposed to the leather one). Don’t let these contrastive readings interfere with your subcategorization.

CPS8. ANIMACY

[Application of Knowledge; Challenge]

Part 1: The term animacy refers to whether something is alive or not. We haven’t included any animacy restrictions in our subcategorization of verbs or nouns in the main body of the text. Consider the following data:

1 Susan bought some flowers for her mother.

2 Susan bought her mother some flowers.

3 Susan bought some flowers for her birthday.

4 *Susan bought her birthday some flowers.

Construct feature structures to explain the acceptability of (d). Hint: you’ll need to use choice brackets {} to do this.

Part 2: Observe the following limited data from Spanish (taken from Legate 2005). When do you use the dative marker a in Spanish? How would you encode this with a feature structure for the verb vimos?

e)	Vimos saw.1pl “We saw Juan.”	a Juan. DAT Juan
f)	Vimos saw.1pl	la casa the house	de Juan. of Juan

“We saw Juan’s house.”

CPS9. IMPLICIT ARGUMENTS ¹⁷

[Creative Thinking; Challenge]

Above we claimed that the verb give requires either an NP and a PP or two NPs (i.e. Heidi gave a punchbowl to Andrew and Heidi gave Andrew a headache). But consider sentences like the following:

1 I gave blood.

2 I don’t give a darn.

3 Andy gives freely of her time.

4 Dan gave his life.

Each of these might lead us to conclude that give requires fewer arguments than we have ^{claimed. Are these simply counterexamples to the claim thatgiveis of subcategory V}[NP

___ NP {NP/PP}] ^{or is something more complicated going on here?}

A related but slightly different issue arises with sentences like those in (5) and (6).

1 5) Dan gives to charity.

2 6) Sorry, I gave last week.

Will your solution for 1–4 work for these examples too?