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READING 4: WORDS BELONG TO DIFFERENT CLASSES
1. IDENTIFYING WORD CLASSES
1.1 How can we tell that words belongs to different classes? We can tell that with this sentence Kim wanted to… in this case only a verb ( Kim wanted to leave ) can fit in,
because if we try to put a noun or an adjective, it becomes ungrammatical: * Kim wanted to browser/green.
So with this example we prove that words belongs to different classes. There are examples in which only nouns can fit in. For example I wonder whether John will ever return or Wolves became extinct in the eighteen century. However, a word very often can belong to more than one word class: escape or official are good examples becuase both of them can be nouns and verbs depending on where they are distributed in the sentence. The escape went well here “escape” is a noun but in here I escaped is a verb. In this cases to find out to which word class belongs, we have to take into account the distribution because there are words that can only be located in one specific place. 1.2 Starting to identify nouns, adjectives and verbs To identify word classes we need formal tests, instead of informal semantic tests. a) A noun is the name of a person, place or thing. b) An adjective is a describing word which modifies a noun. c) A verb expresses an event, action, process or state. This definitions can cause confusions between nouns and verbs because nouns such as sincerety or freedom do not fit in the definition above for noun. Some nouns seem more states than things others like earthquake or tsunami are events and they are still nouns but according to the definition above and the semantic basis these two last words should be verbs. Adding a final - s is a way to check if it is a noun and adding the suffixes - ed , -s or -ing is a way to check if it is a verb. However the last hint is a little difficult because these suffixes can have other grammatical roles. For instance, boring has the - ing suffix and can be a verb: Kim’s boring me to death. But it is an adjective in Kim’s very boring , as we can tell by very , which only modifiers adjectives: we don’t get * Kim’s very boring me to death. We can have examples with adjectives too: Kindness can be exhiliarating. In this sentence, kindness is not an adjective because first of all this word does not modifies a noun (the word itself is a noun) and secondly because we can add an - s ( kindnesses ). Adjectives have their own hints, for example adding the typical adjective endings - er or - est. In the sentence Kim is an electric engine driver we cannot say * Kim is an electricest engine driver , so it means that is not and adjective but a noun. And another way to use distributional evidence is to show that nouns and adjectives are modified by different word classes. Nouns can be modified by and adjective ( electric ), but they can’t be modified by an adverb ( electrically ): Kim is an electric engine driver/*Kim is an electrically engine driver. Linguists use morphological criteria and syntactic criteria to identify word classes. The kinf of evidence is based on the MORPHOSYNTAX of the verbs (the morphology that they take in specific syntax contexts).
- Morphology: is the study of word form.
- Syntax: is the study of rules, principles and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given
language. Linguistic criteria for identifying words classes: a) Morphosyntax: what different forms can the word have in distinct syntactic contexts? b) Distribution: Whereabouts in a phrase or sentence does the word occur, and what words can modify it? c) Function: What work does the word perform in a phrase or sentence? 1.3 How do speakers of a language identify word classes?
Native speakers also use the same methods as linguistics but subconsciously. a) Revived ferry sale fears dog islanders. In this example fears is a noun (which belongs to a noun phrase), but in Mary fears dogs it is a verb. Dog is also a word that in the first sentence is a verb (worry) and in the second one is a noun. b) Treasury eyes wider prescription charges. Eyes in this sentence is in a position which can only be a verb. To prove that dog and eyes are verbs, we can substitute them with other verbs or we can add verb suffixes. Certain verbs must be accompanied by a noun phrase such as islanders or wider prescription charges , these cases this phrases are objects of the verb. All languages seem to have distinct classes of nouns and verbs, so these are language universals (a property found in all languages). Also nouns and verbs in most languages are open class words (we can add new words to these classes, for example the noun byte and the verb breathalyse are recent innovations in English). However, in English and other European languages adjectives are open class words, but in other languages they are closed class of adjectives. Prepositions aren’t open class words but in English there are a lot of types of preopositions conveying different meanings. Nouns, verbs and adjectives are the major lexical word classes, this means that they contain most members and they express the most important meanings (rich in meaning). Articles with conjunctions and pronouns are the “grammatical little words” (they don’t have much semantic content) known as functional categories. SUMMARY : Words fall into different classes. Evidence comes from morphosyntax (each word class has its own unique set of affices), but morphological evidence is not always available, so syntactic evidence is vital too (each word class fits into certain slots which are unique to it). And from functions (each word class has specific functions, performing certain tasks in a sentence).
2. VERBS 2.1 An introduction to verb classes The major function of verbs is to express “predications”. A predicate expresses an event ( collepse , explode …), actions, processes, situations or states in the sentence. Verbs have various syntactic sub-classes: The first type are the intransitive verbs, which only have one participant or argument ( Lee and Kim bot capitulated ). The participant may be an animate being and the verb may be and action or an inanimate beings with verbs that are not actions ( The volcano erupted / Night falls ). The second type are the transitive verbs, which have two arguments ( Lee assassinated his wife ). And the third type are the ditransitive verbs, which have three arguments ( Ceri gave the children some flowers ). In English there are a lot of verbs that are ambitransitive, which can be either transitive or intransitive ( cook, sing, read or eat ). Across al languages, verbs occur with specific “core” arguments (arguments required by the verb). This relationship between a verb and its arguments is one kind of dependency (a relationship contracted between elements in a sentence). 2.2 Verbs and their grammatical categories 2.2.1 Tense and aspect Definition of TENSE by Comrie (1985a: 9): the grammaticalized expression of location in time.
In the semantic roles (thematic/theta roles) the verb determines what semantic roles its arguments must take. There are different types of semantic roles. The first one is the agent, which is an animate being deliberately performing an action, Lee handed the letter to Kim. Subjects are often agents, but not always. The second one is the experiencer, which is an animate being that experiences the feelings of love, hatred…, Kim detests sprouts. Verbs such as love, fear and detest have an experiencer subject. In this sentence Spiders frighten Lill , the direct object is also an experiencer. The third one is the stimulus, which prompts those feelings and it can be an object or a subject, Kim detests sprouts and Spiders frighten Lill. The fourth and the fifth one are similar. A theme moves from one location or one person to another, Lee handed the letter to Kim. A patient is physically affected by the verb’s action, The ball broke the window. A subject can also be a patient, The flowers wilted. The sixth one is the recipient (beneficiary), which is an animate entity that is not necessarily human, Kim gave the toy to her dog. The seventh one is the goal, wich is similar to the recipient and both are introduced by to in English, but it does not benefit from the verb’s action. And the last one is the instrument, which it is used as the cause of the verb’s action, The ball broke the window. It is not a volitional (voluntary) act, so the ball is not the agent. An istrument is often a prepositional clause, We cut the wood with the new saw. 3.2 Syntactic roles for noun phrases These functions or roles are also known as grammatical relations, because they define the noun phrase in terms of their relationships with the verbs of which they are an argument. The most important relations are subject and (direct) object. In this sentences This woman buys all the best apples , All those people are enjoying our apples , Apples were greown in that orchard and Apples, she really enjoys it may be difficult to found the subject and the rule of the subject located before the verb cannot be useful here. There are two tests for subjecthood in English. The first one is subject/verb agreement (verbs and auxiliaries change in form to match or agree with particular features of the subject, such as person and number). For example in this sentence This woman buys all the best apples the verb, that is in the third person, agrees with the singular person. If we change were for was in the phrase Apples were grown , it is ungrammatical (in standard English). This confirms that subjects are defined by their syntactic properties, not by their semantic roles and it shows that we must distinguish between the semantic roles and the grammatical relation of a noun phrase. The second test is the case-marking. Pronouns are restriced to the subject position. This test is appropiate for the subject of a finite verb (or auxiliary). Case means that the form of a noun phrase or a pronoun changes according to its grammatical relation. In the pronouns I / me , we / us , he / him , she / her and they / them the first member is always a subject, so they are known as nominative case forms. Full noun phrases do not change in form in English. Summary of properties of subjects in English
- Normal position immediately before the verb.
- Control subject/verb agreement. Verbs and auxiliaries in the present tense agree wit the subject in person and number ( She sings vs They sing ).
- Pronominal subjects have a special subject form ( I ,^ we ,^ he ,^ she^ and^ they ) known as nominative case.
If there is an example where you cannot test none of this properties ( My cousin kissed his little girl / His little girl kissed my cousin ), you can make the appropiate changes to allow you to use the tests (changing his little girl to she ). Objects of verbs fulfil the requirement of a transitive verb for a second argument, other than the subjetc ( Kim loves apples ). There is a third grammatical relation: prepositinonal object, taken by the noun phrase on the bus, by train , with three friends and also by her in to her. The words that are not underlined are prepositions.English subject pronouns have a special form, but the objects of both verbs and prepositions share the same form. Noun phrases can also be predicates expressing an event or situation. For example Mary is a child. Predicates are linked to the subject by is (a form of the verb be ). Such linking verbs are known as copula verbs (be and seem). SUMMARY: Noun phrases often function as participants or arguments of verbs. They can be classified in terms of their semantic functions (agent…) or in terms of their syntactical functions, known as grammatical relations (subject, direct object and prepositional object). 3.3 Nouns and their grammatical categories 3.3.1 Number Many languages mark nouns and n.phrases according ti whether they are singular (one person) or plural (more than one person). Number must be inferred (deduced) from the context when discussing animals and inanimate objects. Only human nouns are marked for number and not all languages use plural nouns after numerals (Welsh). The basic options for number are singular and plural, in some languages there is also the dual forms for two items and trial forms for three items. It’s also common to find a distinction between count and mass (non- count) nouns. Count nouns refer to items that can be counted ( dog , pen …), unlike mass nouns ( rice , air , oxygen …). Normally we do not expect non-count nouns to occur in plural, * Three rices. 3.3.2 Gender or noun class In many languages, nouns fall into different genders or noun classes. Typically, the classification is essentialy grammatical, and may have only a loose correlation (or no correlation) with the semantic properties of the nouns. Gender may be marked on the noun itself. For instance, in Spanish and Italian nouns ending in - o are usually masculine and nouns ending with - a are usually femenine. These classifications are purely grammatical. However, in other languages such as German or French, nouns have genders but it is not typically marked on the noun itself; instead it is marked on the articles (in Italian il vs la ). In German, articles agree with gender with a singular noun (the word the can be masculine, femenine or neuter). Many other languages than the European, that only have two genders, have far more distinct genderes (Niger-Congo languages), based very loosely on other semantic or biological cartegories like human and non-human. 3.3.3 Possession A language may regard (think of) some types of noun as not referring to possessable things, including features of the natural world such as rocks or rivers. In terms of possessable nouns, it is very common to find a distinction between alienable ( Okombi’s gun ) and inalienable ( Okombi’s foot ) nouns. While in the first one covers types of nouns like possessions, animals or food; the second one includes terms for things that you cannot put aside or dispose of, for instance nouns for body parts or for a person’s relatives. Linguistically alienable possessions involves additional morphology (morpheme) and inalienable possessions just the juxtaposition of the nouns (side-by-side).
one An utter failure , uter can only be an attributive adjective. This examples show that adjectives, like all the major word classes, fall into different sun-classes. 4.2 Adjectives and intensifiers Adjectives pair with a special set of functions words. Intensifiers/degree modifiers specify the extent or degree to which something is, say, full or heavy ( rather , somewhat and enough the last one is placed after the adjective ir modifies). Intesifiers can precede the adjective they modify as in English and German or follow it as in Breton. The ability to appear with the intensifier very is the best test for adjective status. In English very can only modify adjectives which are gradable such as heavy , cantankerous and supportive (someone can be supportive to a greater or lesser extent). So very is unlikely to occur with non-gradable adjectives such as definitive , residual and syntactic. 4.3 Adjectives and their grammatical categories Languages have the morphosyntactic category known as comparison. In English we represent it in two different ways; the first one is morphological, via changes in the form of the adjective itself; for example adding the comparative suffix - er and the superlative suffix- est ( straighter and straightest ). The second method is via the addition of a functional element, more / most ( more honest and most honest ). Some languages have an extra degree of comparison that does not occur in English. For instance, the Celtic family has an equative, used in the “as as” construction. Where English uses the base form of the adjective, Welsh has an - ed equative suffix. The other morpphosyntactic category for adjectives is agreement. Adjectives are often marked to agree with the noun they modify (gender and number). In French and other European languages, adjectives agree in gender and number with the noun, changing their form accordingly. In this sentence Le vin blanc , vin (wine) is masculine, so the attributive adjective, blanc , appears in its masculine form too. Many French adjectives do not have distinct masculine and femenine forms. For example noir masculine (black) is pronounced identically to noire femenine (black), the spelling rule, which adds - e in the femenine, does not reflect genuinely different form. 4.4 Are adjectives essential? Not all languages have an open class of adjectives. For instance, Dixon reports that the Jarawa language has a closed class of 14 adjectives; and Foley reports that the Yimas language has three clear examples of words that are adjectives. How do languages like these manage without the huge, open class of adjectives familiar from European languages? What happens instead is that other major word classes (nouns and verbs) take over the functions fulfilled in other languages by adjectives. Our first examples are from Kwamera, that does have a class of attributive adjectives ( That small child ). But in places where many other languages have a distinct class of predicative adjectives, Kwamera uses what appear to be verbs. The evidence that they are verbs comes from their morphology, or form. Let’s examine the morphosyntax of some Kwamera verbs: the verb dislike has the first person singular iak - prefix. There is no free pronoun for I in this example; instead the first person singular prefix on the verb tells us the person and number of the subject. These same verbal affixes also occur on words which we translate into English as adjectives, such as big and small , in predicative positions: This pig is big or When I was still small… (progressive). Since they take the same prefixes as verbs, this is evidence that the words for big and small in predicative positions actually are verbs in Kwamera. Now we turn to Yimas, that has a closed class containing three true adjectives, that must appear immediately before the noun and not after or separated from it. Other words denoting qualities in Yimas are either verbs
or nouns. Starting with the “adjectival verbs”, we find that these have different properties from true adjectives. This sentence * Black pig is ungrammatical because black is not one of the three adjectives that can occur in this construction, right before the noun it modifies. The second example A black pig shows the same stem, but (like a verb) this now has both a tense marker - k and an agreement marker - n ; this shows agreement with pig in noun class, and this noun happens to be a singular noun from class III. Both of this suffixes are typical of verbs in Yimas. Moreover, unlike an adjective, the “adjectival” verb does not have to appear immediately before the noun at all; in fact, it can occur after or separated. In English, we distinguish between adjectives like black from change-to-state verbs like darken or blacken. But in Yimas the same verbal stem does all this work. In this phrase (My) skin darkened , skin agrees with the verb, using the relevant subject agreement marker for this noun class. The verb has a “perfective” marker. The three true adjectives cannot behave in this way. This language also has a class of “adjectival nouns”. For example in English I’m feeling happy is translated to Yimas like Hapiness does/feels on me. This means something like Hapiness is with me , and we can see that happy belongs to a specific noun class, and triggers (provoke) agreement. In sum, many languages use verbs or nouns in place of adjectives ( Kim has kidness rather than Kim is kind ). Are there languages without a recognizable class of adjectives at all? This is a controversial issue, but two linguistics (Baker and Dixon) have argued recently that all languages do have a formal class of adjectives. In some languages, this may be a very small class of adjectives, as in Yimas. Whether or not adjectives are an essential word class, they are widespread corss-linguistically.
5. ADVERBS 5.1 Adverbs and adjectives In English, central members of the traditional word class of adverbs are words like suddenly , slowly and gradually. These central members are formed from the related adjectives by an affix - ly , which turns adjectives like sudden into suddenly. We cannot identify adverbs in English by their morphology. Numerous adjectives in Enlish do not take the - ly affix ( big , small , ill , young …). Some irregular English adverbs have the same form as the adjective ( She works fast /* She works fastly ). There is an entirely different adverb which does have the form hardly ( She hardly works ), but which has the opposite meaning. Some - ly words are adjectives ( ungodly , kindly , ungainly , lonely …), not adverbs, because they modify nouns but no verbs (* He speaks ingodly / Kim stopped suddenly ). One of the functions of adverbs is to modify verbs. Adjectives and adverbs do not generally occur in the same syntactic environment: adjectives modify nouns ( A strange song ) and adverbs modify adjectives ( A strangely sad song ), other adverbs ( She spoke strangely lucidly ) and verbs ( She spoke strangely ). Adjectives and adverbs cannot occur in identical positions, but instead occur what is called complementary distribution: where one appears, the other does not, but together they cover all the available positions (adjectives—>nouns/adverbs—>other lexical word classes) and word classes. We can predict which will occur in any given syntactic environment, because adjectives and adverbs complement each other in this way. Some linguistics consider them to be sub-classes of the same word class. We can regard this to be the adjective class, since this is more basic in form. They have grammatical properties in common; first of all they share modifiers (they take the same intensifiers, very , quiet , most unusual / ly ). Second of all, they can appear in the as__as comparative construction ( as miserable/miserably as Kim ). And the comparative suffixes (-est, -er) occur on a few adverbs ( sooner , soonest ) as well as on adjectives ( redder , reddest ). However, they have some distinctions; for example the adjective uncertain can take a following whether … sentence, whereas the related adverb cannot.
And third, we can re-evaluate “verbal particles”, which is referring to the small words that go together with verbs in “phrasal verb” expressions such as run down , put back or take over. These particles are also classified as prepositions by the right test, Lee ran his apartment right down. Prepositions are used widely in English and although not all members of the word class behave in a standard way, they do share properties in common. 6.2 Postpositions When prepositions like in, over and beside are transitive, their object n.phrase follows the preposition (Over the summer). However, in some languages, the object n.phrase always precedes the preposition, as in Japanese (Tokyo from). These words are not called prepositions but postpositions (they follow the n.phrase which is their object). The cover term for the whole class is adposition. 6.3 Grammatical categories for adpositions In most languages, there are no adpositional inflections: only the major lexical word classes noun, verb and adjective are typically associated with any morphosyntactic categories. In other words, we do not expect to find “endings” on prepositions and postpositions. However, a minority of languages do have inflected prepositions (Celtic and Semitic families, person, number and gender).
7. CONCLUSION This Reading provides an overview of the distribution, function and morphosyntax of the major lexical word classes (verb, noun, adjective and adverb) as well as the adposition class. Word classes are distinguished by their morphosyntactic categories, functions and patterns of distribution (covers both the slots which words can appear in, and the modyfing words that co-occur with them). We saw that specific functional elements often pair up with a particular lexical word class such as a noun or an adjective. To count as a distinct word class, a set of words must have some properties which distinguish them from the other ones. If we do not find any properties, then it would be unscientific to make artificial divisions in the data. It is important not to expect all languages to look the same. For instance, we should not think that just because, say, English and Italian have an open class of adjectives, then all languages must have one. We have seen that grammatical information can be represented either morphologically (via changes in the form of words from majjor classes) or by the use of separate “functional” elements. Both methods of representing grammatical information can occur within a single language, but languages tend to lean towards one method or the other. Languages that have a lot of morphology represent grammatical information without needing many of the small “functional” words. Ex: Greek, Slavonuc family or Finnish. Languages with little morphology (Chinese or Vietnamese) tend to need more of the small “functional” elements to represent grammatical information.
