LEXICAL CATEGORIES
LI 2013
N AT H A L I E F. M A R T I N
Syntactic/Lexical Categories
C AT E G O R I E S O F W O R D S
D I S T I N G U I S H I N G C AT E G O R I E S :
• INFLECTION
• DISTRIBUTION
A Concise
Introduction to
Linguistics,
Rowe & al. 2012:
p. 107-114.
Contemporary
Linguistics Analysis,
O’Grady & al., 2009:
p. 146-150.
Making Sense of It All!
Lewis Carroll in his 1872 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice
Found There, a poem entitled Jabberwocky.
What is the lexical category of:
g) Mimsy
a) Brillig
h) Borogroves
b) Slithy
i)
Mome
c) Toves*
j)
Raths
d) Gyre*
k) Outgrabe
e) Gimble*
f)
Wabe*
Which are English words? Why is it
important that those words remain
there?
Syntactic/lexical Categories
 = Word/Grammatical Classes = Parts of Speech
 All languages have syntactic categories. The
syntactic category of a word determines the role it
can play in a sentence.
 Only a noun can complete the sentence “Give a
__________ to me.”
Syntactic Categories (1)
Lexical categories
 Noun (N)
 Verb (V)
 Adjective (A)
 Preposition (P)
 Adverb (Adv)
 Clearly identifiable
meanings!
Examples
 moisture, policy
 melt, remain
 good, intelligent
 to, near
 slowly, now
Syntactic Categories (2)
Non-lexical categories:
Examples:
 Determiner
 the,
(Det)
this

 Auxiliary
(Aux)
 Conjunction (Con)

Functional words!
 will,
can
 and, or
Lexical Categories of Words


 Lexical Categories



 Non-Lexical

Categories


Nouns
Verbs
Adjectives
Adverbs
Prepositions *
Determiner
Auxiliary
Conjunctions
TRICKS!
Distinguishing Categories
 By meaning:
 Nouns = entities (people, things), including individuals (Harry,
Sue), objects (book, desk),
 Verbs = actions (run, jump), sensations (feel, hurt), and states
(be, remain)
 Adjectives: Properties and attributes of a noun.
 Adverbs:
Properties and attributes of the actions, sensations, and states
(verbs)
 Manner and time


What about words like: likelihood, give a push, near, etc.
Distinguishing Categories
 Native speakers may have a good intuition
about the syntactic category of a word.
 But linguists require more objective ways of
determining syntactic categories.
 There are three tests one can use:
1.
2.
3.
Inflection
Distribution
Verification through replacement
Test 1: Inflection
 Certain inflectional paradigms apply only to one
syntactic category.
 For example, if a word can take the inflectional suffix
-ed in English, it must belong to the verb category.
 Lets try in out:
 The cute cat dances.
 You think the end is near.
 What about these words: sing (-ed*), intelligent (-er*),
knowledge(-s*), etc.
Test 2: Distribution
 The words with which a word may co-occur can be
used to determine its syntactic category.
 Example: only nouns can come after a or the in
English.
 All languages have such distributional restrictions on
syntactic categories.
 Lets try in out:
Great joy is to come in the morning.
 Joy comes later today.
 Holidays are the best!

Distribution tests – Rules of other languages
 Distribution tests for syntactic categories are
different in all languages.
 Chinese has no articles like a, the. So you can’t test
for nouns with them.
 But in Chinese, only nouns co-occur with
“classifiers”. If a word can come after a classifier, it
must be a noun.
Verification Test 3: Replacement
 To test to see if you have assigned the right
lexical category, it is possible to replace the
word with another word of that same
category – even if the sentence becomes
nonsensical.
Lets try in out:
 Great
joy is to come in the morning.
 Joy comes later today.
 Holidays are the best!
Indicate the category of each word in the
following sentences.
a. The glass suddenly broke.
b. A jogger ran towards the end of the lane.
c. The peaches never appear quite ripe.
d. Gillian will play the trumpet and the drums in the
orchestra.
Rowe & al., 2012: p. 114.
Translation
and Lexical
Categories
W H AT G O T L O S T
I N T R A N S L AT I O N ?
W R I T T E N O N M Y H E AT E R :