Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

everyday linguistic interaction are dealt with in section 14. Some language disorders give rise to problems which are rather specifically to do with words, and we shall introduce these difficulties and discuss their implications in section 15.

Finally, adopting the sociolinguistic perspective, in section 16 we examine some of the issues which affect words when languages or varieties of a single language are in contact.

9

Word classes

A natural first step in a scientific approach to words is to seek to establish the different types of words which appear in languages. It’s easy to see that native speakers can divide words into different types (even if they can’t actually

tell you how they do this), and, moreover, we can see that speakers can use

their knowledge of what the different word types are when they are confronted with a completely new word. Suppose, for instance, that you hear the sentence in (87):

(87)

A plingle has arrived

Of course, you don’t know what plingle means, but you can immediately

infer that plingle is the sort of expression which occurs in the constructions the plingle, two plingles, every plingle which has ever existed, etc. In short, (87)

enables you to assign plingle to a particular class of words, and once you know what class of words it belongs to, you know a great deal about its potential for occurrence within the language. It is reasonable, then, to suppose that the word class to which a word belongs is specified in that word’s lexical entry. The immediate task facing us in this section is that of developing criteria for assigning words to classes.

Lexical categories

A familiar distinction is that between nouns (N) and verbs (V), and

there are several ways in which we can justify this for English. For instance, nouns often refer to types of concrete objects in the world (e.g. cake, engine, moon, waiter, and, we might now suppose, plingle!), while verbs typically refer to activities (applaud, steal, collide, bark). Furthermore, verbs and nouns exhibit a different range of forms: most nouns have a special form for the plural

(engine ~ engines), while verbs have a larger number of forms, as shown by the sentences in (88):

(88) a.

Dogs bark

b.

Fido barks

c.

Fido is barking

d.

Fido barked

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words

Thirdly, nouns and verbs combine with other words to form phrases in distinct ways. For example, a noun will often be found preceded by a definite (the) or indefinite article (a/an) (the moon, an engine). Most forms of a verb cannot be preceded by these articles (*the applauds, *an applauded ). If we form a phrase consisting of an article and a noun, this can often follow a verb to form a larger phrase (steal a car, applaud the singer) – we say that a car and the singer function as complements of the verbs steal and applaud in these constructions. Words

which are unmistakably verbs cannot themselves fulfil the roles of complements (*We heard barked). Additionally, an article–noun sequence may combine with

a verb to form a whole sentence as in the dog barked. Here, the phrase the dog functions as the subject of the sentence (see section 17 for further discussion of subject and complement). Again, words which are unmistakably verbs cannot

themselves fulfil the role of subject (*Barked surprised us). Generalising, we say that subjects and complements are arguments of verbs and a typical simple

sentence, such as that in (89), consists of a verb (stole) and its arguments (the waiter, a cake):

(89)

The waiter stole a cake

A third major word class recognised in traditional grammar is adjectives (A).

These typically refer to properties which people or things possess and they are used to modify nouns, e.g. happy man, noisy engine. Although they share with articles the property of appearing in front of a noun, if an article and an adjective both combine with a noun, they do so in a fixed order (a happy man, *happy

a man, the noisy engine, *noisy the engine). We can also ascribe a property by putting the adjective after a form of the verb be to form a sentence (the man is happy, the engine was noisy). Like nouns and verbs, many adjectives have

special forms indicating the extent to which a property is true of something: the comparative form, happier, ‘happy to a greater degree than’, and the superlative form, happiest, ‘happy to the greatest degree’.

A fourth class of word is adverbs (ADV). While an adjective modifies a

noun, an adverb typically modifies a verb, adjective or another adverb, indicating how, when or why something happened or the degree to which a property

characterises an individual or event. Examples illustrating these three uses appear in (90) – the modifying adverbs are in italics and the modified item is in bold:

(90) a.

The waiter carelessly dropped the plate

b.

The engine is really noisy

c.

The audience applauded the singer very enthusiastically

(note that in 90c, the adverb enthusiastically, itself modified by very, modifies the verb applauded).

Adverbs can readily be formed from a majority of adjectives by the addition

of -ly: happily, slowly, reluctantly, etc. However, adverbs which do not fit this characterisation are far from uncommon: very, well, yesterday.

Word classes

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Another important word class is illustrated in (91):

(91) a.

Harriet was sitting under a tree

b.

They’re due to arrive before noon

c.

That is the end of the news

d.

There was a debate about economic policy

The italicised words in (91) precede nouns (or phrases centred around nouns, such as a tree or economic policy). They typically serve to relate objects, people or events in space or time (under/before), though often the relationship is more abstract as in (91c, d). Words of this type are called prepositions (P), and they do not have the capacity to appear in a range of different forms (*unders,

*abouted, *ofest, *beforely).

Up to now, we have distinguished five word classes or lexical categories. In doing this, we have appealed to three types of criteria for establishing a category: semantic (relying on meaning), morphological (relying on word forms) and

syntactic (taking account of behaviour in phrases). Taken together, these criteria identify our separate classes quite well. However, it is important to be clear that there are plenty of cases where one or other type of criterion fails to work. For instance, some nouns refer to abstract ideas rather than concrete objects ( justice, idea, quantity); worse still, there are nouns such as game and speech which refer to types of activities, the semantic criterion we introduced for recognising verbs.

For some nouns the pluralisation criterion does not work in a straightforward fashion, either because their plural forms are irregular (men, women, children) or because they lack a plural form entirely (*furnitures, *sakes). Likewise, there are verbs which refer to states rather than activities ( fear, border (on)), and other difficulties with applying these criteria too rigidly will become apparent as we proceed. Despite these problems, it is uncontroversial to suppose that lexical entries in the lexicon must contain an indication of word-class membership

(exercises 1, 2, 3 and 4).

A particularly interesting illustration of the semantic correlations breaking down arises from observing that English provides many ways of forming new

words from old ones. For example, we can form a noun happiness from the

adjective happy. That happiness is a noun is indicated by the fact that it can be preceded by the definite article (the happiness John felt), and that it is not an adjective by the fact that it does not have comparative and superlative forms (*happinesser, *happinessest). Thus, happiness is a noun denoting the property of being happy. So, both the adjective and the noun seem in this case to denote a property, and semantic criteria for establishing class membership are not useful.