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| Underlying Syntactic Analysis of English Compounds (Quirk)
CATEGORIES AND SUBCATEGORIES OF WORDS
The different types of words are variously called parts of speech, word classes, or lexical categories. Some of them recognize 7 word classes (see the table). You may find that other grammars recognise different word classes from the ones listed here. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, for wxample, gives this list of 8 for English: Noun, Pronoun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb, Conjunction, Preposition, Interjection.. They may also define the boundaries between the classes in different ways. In some grammars, for instance, pronouns are treated as a separate word class. A difference like this should not cause confusion. Instead, it highlights an important principle in grammar, known as GRADIENCE. This refers to the fact that the boundaries between the word classes are not absolutely fixed. Many word classes share characteristics with others, and there is considerable overlap between some of the classes. In other words, the boundaries are "fuzzy", so different grammars draw them in different places. Speakers recognize word classes through three different, but complementary, processes - the use of word endings, function words, and word order. For example, consider the two quotes below. Can you tell which words are adjectives or adverbs, words that modify or describe? 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves - Lewis Carroll, "The Jabberwocky" in Through the Looking Glass The gloopy malchicks scattered razdrazily to the mesto. - Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange Many people have the sense that the words brillig, slithy, gloopy, and razdrazily are the words that modify. That sense is a combination of factors, including the suffixes -y (also spelt -i- when a second ending is used on the same word, as in razdrazily) and -ly - two suffixes that mark adjectives and adverbs. But word endings are not the only clues to help us find the modifiers. Each sentence also gives us clues from function words and word order. In English, it is common to find noun phrases with a predictable structure of Determiner + Adjective + Noun (the clever children), so the combination of both determiners (the) marking the beginning of noun phrases and word order in the sentences above help us interpret slithy and gloopy as adjectives. It is also common in English to find adjectives after forms of the verb be when the verb functions as the 'copula' verb, the linking verb, as in Elizabeth is clever. So in the first sentence, the verb was (part of the poetic fusion of it was into 'twas) helps us to interpret brillig as an adjective. Finally, it is also common to find adverbs after verbs in English, as in Emily learns quickly. That fact helps us to interpret razdrazily as an adverb in the last example sentence.
PROBLEM OF CLASSIFICATION The parts of speech are classes of words, all the members of these classes having certain characteristics in common which distinguish them from the members of other classes. The problem of word classification into parts of speech still remains one of the most controversial problems in modern linguistics. The attitude of grammarians with regard to parts of speech and the basis of their classification varied a good deal at different times. Only in English grammarians have been vacillating between 3 and 13 parts of speech. There are four approaches to the problem: 1.Classical (logical-inflectional) 2.Functional 3.Distributional 4.Complex The classical parts of speech theory goes back to ancient times. It is based on Latin grammar. According to the Latin classification of the parts of speech all words were divided dichotomically into declinableand indeclinableparts of speech. This system was reproduced in the earliest English grammars. The first of these groups, declinable words, included nouns, pronouns, verbs and participles, the second – indeclinable words – adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections. The logical-inflectional classification is quite successful for Latin or other languages with developed morphology and synthetic paradigms but it cannot be applied to the English language because the principle of declinability/indeclinability is not relevant for analytical languages. A new approach to the problem was introduced in the XIX century by Henry Sweet. He took into account the peculiarities of the English language. This approach may be defined as functional. He resorted to the functional features of words and singled out nominative units and particles. To nominative parts of speech belonged noun-words (noun, noun-pronoun, noun-numeral, infinitive, gerund), adjective-words (adjective, adjective-pronoun, adjective-numeral, participles), verb (finite verb, verbals – gerund, infinitive, participles), while adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection belonged to the group of particles. However, though the criterion for classification was functional, Henry Sweet failed to break the tradition and classified words into those having morphological forms and lacking morphological forms, in other words, declinable and indeclinable. A distributionalapproachto the parts to the parts of speech classification can be illustrated by the classification introduced by Charles Fries. He wanted to avoid the traditional terminology and establish a classification of words based on distributive analysis, that is, the ability of words to combine with other words of different types. At the same time, the lexical meaning of words was not taken into account. According to Charles Fries, the words in such sentences as 1. Woggles ugged diggles; 2. Uggs woggled diggs; and 3. Woggs diggled uggles are quite evident structural signals, their position and combinability are enough to classify them into three word-classes. In this way, he introduced four major classes of words and 15 form-classes. Let us see how it worked. Three test frames formed the basis for his analysis: Frame A - The concert was good (always); Frame B - The clerk remembered the tax (suddenly); Frame C – The team went there. The parenthesised positions are optional from the point of view of the structural completion of sentences. As a result of successive substitution tests on the cited "frames" the following lists of positional words ("form-words", or "parts of speech") are established: Class 1. (A) concert, coffee, taste, container, difference, etc. (B) clerk, husband, supervisor, etc.; tax, food, coffee, etc. (C) team, husband, woman, etc. Class 2. (A) was, seemed, became, etc. (B) remembered, wanted, saw, suggested, etc. (C) went, came, ran,... lived, worked, etc. Class 3. (A) good, large, necessary, foreign, new, empty, etc. Class 4. (A) there, here, always, then, sometimes, etc. (B) clearly, sufficiently, especially, repeatedly, soon, etc. (C) there, back, out, etc.; rapidly, eagerly, confidently, etc. All these words can fill in the positions of the frames without affecting their general structural meaning (such as "thing and its quality at a given time" — the first frame; "actor — action — thing acted upon — characteristic of the action" — the second frame; "actor — action — direction of the action" — the third frame). It turned out that his four classes of words were practically the same as traditional nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. What is really valuable in Charles Fries’ classification is his investigation of 15 groups of function words (form-classes) because he was the first linguist to pay attention to some of their peculiarities. All the classifications mentioned above appear to be one-sided because parts of speech are discriminated on the basis of only one aspect of the word: either its meaning or its form, or its function. In modern linguistics, parts of speech are discriminated according to three criteria: semantic, formal and functional. This approach may be defined as complex. The semantic criterion presupposes the grammatical meaning of the whole class of words (general grammatical meaning). The formalcriterion reveals paradigmatic properties: relevant grammatical categories, the form of the words, their specific inflectional and derivational features. The functionalcriterion concerns the syntactic function of words in the sentence and their combinability. Thus, when characterizing any part of speech we are to describe: a) its semantics; b) its morphological features; c) its syntactic peculiarities. We use a combination of three criteria for determining the word class of a word: 1. The meaning of the word 2. The form or `shape' of the word 3. The position or `environment' of the word in a sentence. Meaning Using this criterion, we generalize about the kind of meanings that words convey. For example, we could group together the words brother and car, as well as David, house, and London, on the basis that they all refer to people, places, or things. In fact, this has traditionally been a popular approach to determining members of the class of nouns. It has also been applied to verbs, by saying that they denote some kind of "action", like cook, drive, eat, run, shout, walk. This approach has certain merits, since it allows us to determine word classes by replacing words in a sentence with words of "similar" meaning. For instance, in the sentence My son cooks dinner every Sunday, we can replace the verb cooks with other "action" words: My son cooks dinner every Sunday. My son prepares dinner every Sunday. My son eats dinner every Sunday. My son misses dinner every Sunday. On the basis of this replacement test, we can conclude that all of these words belong to the same class, that of "action" words, or verbs. However, this approach also has some serious limitations. The definition of a noun as a word denoting a person, place, or thing, is wholly inadequate, since it excludes abstract nouns such as time, imagination, repetition, wisdom, and chance. Similarly, to say that verbs are "action" words excludes a verb like be, as in I want to be happy. What "action" does be refer to here? So although this criterion has a certain validity when applied to some words, we need other, more stringent criteria as well. 2. The form or `shape' of a word As in many other languages, English employs a great number of word endings to signal different word classes. Many words also take what are called INFLECTIONS, that is, regular changes in their form under certain conditions. For example, nouns can take a plural inflection, usually by adding an -s at the end:
3. The position or `environment' of a word in a sentence This criterion refers to where words typically occur in a sentence, and the kinds of words which typically occur near to them. We can illustrate the use of this criterion using a simple example. Compare the following: [1] I cook dinner every Sunday [2] The cook is on holiday In [1], cook is a verb, but in [2], it is a noun. We can see that it is a verb in [1] because it takes the inflections which are typical of verbs: I cook dinner every Sunday I cooked dinner last Sunday I am cooking dinner today My son cooks dinner every Sunday And we can see that cook is a noun in [2] because it takes the plural -s inflection The cooks are on holiday If we really need to, we can also apply a replacement test, based on our first criterion, replacing cook in each sentence with "similar" words:
Notice that we can replace verbs with verbs, and nouns with nouns, but we cannot replace verbs with nouns or nouns with verbs: *I chef dinner every Sunday *The eat is on holiday It should be clear from this discussion that there is no one-to-one relation between words and their classes. Cook can be a verb or a noun -- it all depends on how the word is used. In fact, many words can belong to more than one word class. Here are some more examples: She looks very pale (verb) She's very proud of her looks (noun) He drives a fast car (adjective) He drives very fast on the motorway (adverb) Turn on the light (noun) I'm trying to light the fire (verb) I usually have a light lunch (adjective) You will see here that each italicised word can belong to more than one word class. However, they only belong to one word class at a time, depending on how they are used. So it is quite wrong to say, for example, "cook is a verb". Instead, we have to say something like "cook is a verb in the sentence I cook dinner every Sunday, but it is a noun in The cook is on holiday". The linguistic evidence drawn from our grammatical study makes it possible to divide all the words of the language into: a) those denoting things, objects, notions, qualities, etc. – words with the corresponding references in the objective reality – notionalwords; b) those having no references of their own in the objective reality; most of them are used only as grammatical means to form up and frame utterances – functionwords, or grammaticalwords. So, the word classes of traditional grammar are a combination of the bases (notional) and the function (grammatical) words. The bases are called the open classes, so named because it is relatively easy to create new words in each of those categories, while the function words are called the closed classes, since it is less common (though not impossible) for speakers of a language to create new vocabulary in those categories. Slang illustrates the creativity of speakers to invent new vocabulary in the open classes, such as the noun homeboy (a friend), or the verb to ralph (to vomit), or the adjective rad (good). But when was the last time someone invented new vocabulary in one of the closed classes? The class of nouns, for instance, is potentially infinite, since it is continually being expanded as new scientific discoveries are made, new products are developed, and new ideas are explored. In the late twentieth century, for example, developments in computer technology have given rise to many new nouns: Internet, website, URL, CD-ROM, email, newsgroup, bitmap, modem, multimedia New verbs have also been introduced: download, upload, reboot, right-click, double-click The adjective and adverb classes can also be expanded by the addition of new words, though less prolifically. On the other hand, we never invent new prepositions, determiners, or conjunctions. These classes include words like of, the, and but. The subclass of pronouns, within the open noun class, is also closed. It is commonly recognized that the notional parts of speech are nouns, pronouns, numerals, verbs, adjectives, adverbs; the functional parts of speech are articles, particles, prepositions, conjunctions and modal words. The division of language units into notion and function words reveals the interrelation of lexical and grammatical types of meaning. In notional words the lexical meaning is predominant. In function words the grammatical meaning dominates over the lexical one. However, in actual speech the border line between notional and function words is not always clear cut. Some notional words develop the meanings peculiar to function words - e.g. seminotional words – to turn, to get, etc. Notional words constitute the bulk of the existing word stock while function words constitute a smaller group of words. Although the number of function words is limited (there are only about 50 of them in Modern English), they are the most frequently used units. Generally speaking, the problem of words’ classification into parts of speech is far from being solved. Some words cannot find their proper place. The most striking example here is the class of adverbs. Some language analysts call it a ragbag, a dustbin (Frank Palmer), Russian academician V.V. Vinogradov defined the class of adverbs in the Russian language as мусорная куча. It can be explained by the fact that to the class of adverbs belong those words that cannot find their place anywhere else. At the same time, there are no grounds for grouping them together either. Compare: perfectly (She speaks English perfectly) and again (He is here again). Examples are numerous (all temporals). There are some words that do not belong anywhere - e.g. after all. Speaking about after all it should be mentioned that this unit is quite often used by native speakers, and practically never by our students. Some more striking examples: anyway, actually, in fact. The problem is that if these words belong nowhere, there is no place for them in the system of words, then how can we use them correctly? What makes things worse is the fact that these words are devoid of nominative power, and they have no direct equivalents in the Ukrainian or Russian languages. Meanwhile, native speakers use these words subconsciously, without realizing how they work. |
