Andrew Carnie - Syntax

You now have enough information to answer WBE6, GPS7, and CPS4 .

3.3 Some Functional (Closed) Categories of English

We’ll survey here some of the main functional categories of English. This list is by no means complete. While it is possible to provide distributional definitions for various functional parts of speech, because they are closed class there are relatively few members of each class. So it is possible to simply list most of them.

We’ll start our categorization with prepositions(abbreviated P). Prepositions appear before nouns (or more precisely, noun phrases). English prepositions include the following:

12) Prepositions of English (P): to, from, under, over, with, by, at, above, before, after, through, near, on, off, for, in, into, of, during, across, without, since, until.

The class of determiners(D) is a little broader. It contains a number of subcategories including articles, quantifiers, numerals, deictics, and possessive pronouns. Determiners appear at the very beginning of English noun phrases.

13) Determiners of English (D)

1 Articles : the, a, an

2 Deictic articles : this, that, these, those, yon

3 Quantifiers :6every, some, many, most, few, all, each, any, less, fewer, no

4 (Cardinal) numerals : one, two, three, four, etc.

5 Possessive pronouns :7my, your, his, her, its, our, their

6 Some wh-question words : which, whose

You now have enough information to answer WBE7 & 8 .

Conjunctions(Conj) are words that connect two or more phrases together on an equal level:

14) Conjunctions of English (Conj): and, or, nor, neither … nor, either … or

The class of complementizers(C) also connects structures together, but they embed one clause inside of another instead of keeping them on an equal level:

15) Complementizers of English (C): that, for, if, whether

One of the most important categories that we’ll use is the category of tense(T). For the moment we will not include tense suffixes such as -ed and -s in this class, and treat those as parts of verbs (we will revisit this issue in chapter 9). Instead, the category T consists of auxiliaries, modals, and the non-finite tense marker. In the older syntactic literature, the category T is sometimes called Infl (inflection) or Aux (Auxiliary). We’ll use the more modern T.

16) Tense categories of English (T)

Auxiliaries : have/has/had, am/is/are/was/were, do/does/did Modals : will, would, shall, should, can, could, may, might, must Non-finite tense marker : to

There is one special category containing only one word: not , which we’ll call negation(Neg). There are other categories that express negation (e.g., the determiners no, any , and the noun none ). We’ll reserve the category Neg for the word not , however.

You now have enough information to answer WBE9 & 10, GPS8–10, and CPS5 .

Cardinal numerals, in phrases like two books , seem to function like quantifiers like all or few at least in terms of their function as counting elements. In the case of one big book , the one can stand in place of an obligatory determiner (normally we’d require a determiner like a or the -- leaving off the determiner makes the phrase ungrammatical ( *big book ). This suggests, then, that numerals are of category D. However, consider the case of these two books . In this phrase, the numeral functions more like an adjective, in that it appears between the deictic article these and the noun. What category are numerals? That’s a difficult question to answer, and one that requires more theoretical tools than I can give you in this book, at this stage in your learning at least. I tell my own students that for the purposes of doing assignments in this book either analysis is plausible, and possibly both situations exist.

You may have noticed that in sections 2 and 3, I hinted that each major part of speech category may have subtypes. For example, we listed six different kinds of D (articles, deictics, quantifiers, numerals, possessive pronouns, wh -pronouns) and three kinds of T (auxiliaries, modals, and the non-finite marker). The technical term for these subtypes is subcategories. For the most part, we are going to be interested in the main part of speech categories (N, V, Adj, Adv, P, D, Conj, C, T, and Neg), but sometimes we will want to refer to the subcategories.

One way to mark subcategories is through the use of features. Consider the case of

T. To distinguish among the subcategories we can appeal to the features [±MODAL] and [±FINITE]:

17) Auxiliary 8 T[–MODAL, +FINITE]

Modal T [+MODAL, +FINITE]

to T [+MODAL, -FINITE]

One set of possible values of these features is missing ([-MODAL, -FINITE]). We might similarly distinguish among tense forms using features like [±PAST] etc. So was is [+PAST]; is is [-PAST] etc.

Similarly we can distinguish among the various kinds of determiner using features like [±WH], [±QUANTIFIER], [±DEICTIC], etc. The details of this kind of analysis aren’t crucial to the grammar fragments you are given in this book, as long as you understand the basic concept behind using features to mark subcategories. 9In the rest of this section,

we look at some of the subcategories of N, V, and P that will be of use to us in the rest of the book.

I’m not going to discuss subcategories of Adj and Adv, although they exist. In a grey textbox above, I’ve suggested that Adj and Adv are themselves subcategories of a larger category A. We also find many subcategories within the Adj and Adv categories. Some of these distinctions are explored in problem sets at the end of the chapter.

4.1 Subcategories of Nouns

We can slice the pie of English nouns apart along several dimensions including plural vs. singular, proper vs. common, pronoun vs. lexical noun, and count vs. mass noun.

First, let’s distinguish along the line of plurality. English nouns can be either singular or plural. The distinction between singular and plural is usually morphologically marked with one of the plural endings like -s or -es (although it need not be, as in mice or deer ). Most singular nouns in English require a D; 10plural ones do not require a D, although they allow one:

18)

1 *Cat ate the spider.

2 The cat ate the spider.

3 Cats ate the spider.

4 The cats ate the spider.

We mark this distinction with the feature [±PLURAL].

Closely related to the plural/singular distinction is the countvs. massnoun distinction. Count nouns represent individual, “countable” elements. For example, apple is a count noun. “Mass nouns” usually can’t be counted in the same way. For example sincerity and air are mass nouns. There are two easy distributional tests to distinguish between mass and count nouns. Mass nouns take the quantifier much , while count nouns take many .

19)

1 many apples

2 *much apples/apple11

3 *many sincerity

4 *many air

5 much sincerity

6 much air

Like plurals, mass nouns generally don’t require a determiner, but count nouns do:

20)

1 *I ate apple.