Morphosyntax 1 – Lecture 2 – Word classes
open classes (N, V, Adj, Adv) vs. closed classes (Pro, Det, Aux, Conj, Prep)
Nouns (N) semantically are words used to refer to people (boy), objects (backpack),
creatures (dog), places (school), qualities (roughness), phenomena (earthquake) and
abstract ideas (love) as if they were all ‘things’.
Verbs (V) semantically are words used to refer to various kinds of actions (go, talk) and
states (be, have) involving people and things in events (Jessica is ill and has a sore throat
so she can’t talk or go anywhere)
noun X verb
-
Use of article
Position in a sentence
Adjectives (Adj) are words used, typically with nouns, to provide more information
about the things referred to (happy people, large objects, a strange experience), they are
used to modify nouns
Adverbs (Adv) - while an adjective modifies a noun, an adverb typically modifies a verb,
adjective or another adverb - they provide more information about actions, states and
events (slowly, yesterday). Adverbs like really, very are used with adjectives to modify
information about things
Pronouns (Pro) are words (she, herself, they, it, you) used in place of noun phrases,
typically referring to people and things already known (She talks to herself. They said it
belonged to you).
Determiners (Det) - articles are words (a, an, the) used with nouns to form noun
phrases classifying those ‘things’ (You can have a banana or an apple) or identifying
them as already known (I’ll take the apple).
- demonstratives – they give context (this, that, these, those) or are
“counting words” (each, every, all)
Auxiliaries (Aux) - primary verbs - provide verb time frame - ongoing, past, future
(have [has, had], do [does, did], be [is, are, was, were, been])
- modal verbs - state possibility, necessity, advisability,… (may,
might, can, could, must, shall, should, would)
!!! V x Aux !!!
Conjunctions (Conj) - serve to join words or phrases together to form larger phrases of
the same type (your money or your life), or join whole sentences together to form new
sentences (Harriet is English but she speaks Russian)
Prepositions (Prep) are words (at, in, on, near, with, without) used with nouns in
phrases providing information about time (at five o’clock, in the morning), place (on the
table, near the window) and other connections (with a knife, without a thought)
involving actions and things. Often the relationship is abstract (That is the end of the
news. X This is the end of the street.)
Minor classes:
numerals (Num) (one, twenty-three, first)
interjections (Inj) (oh, ah, ouch)
individual treatment: the negative not, the infinitive marker to (Inf)
Problematic points:
-
classes have 'fuzzy edges'
multiple membership
Homonyms - homophones
- homographs
Agreement - individual parts of a sentence have to „agree“ with other parts in
categories of ‘number’, ‘person’, ‘tense’, ‘voice’ and ‘gender’
Three types of criteria for establishing a word category:
- semantic (relying on meaning)
- morphological (relying on word forms)
- syntactic (taking account of behaviour in phrases) - the most important one
Functional words (~closed classes + Inf) - often determine a grammatical category
X Content words (~open classes)