Slaying a Syntactic Monster:

A Network Theory Approach to Syntactic Categories

From a network theory perspective, general categories are shown to be inadmissible

in agreement with Croft (2001). Accumulated patterns in word usage form a word co-
occurrence network, in which a node denotes an orthographic word and a link, the
precedence relation between two adjacently co-occurring words within a sentence.
The resulting link patterns represent a detailed (non-functional) distributional
analysis, useful for establishing syntactic elements.

Figure 1

The motif 6 pattern (figure 1) captures the notion of a syntactic category, in that
certain function words may be associated with certain syntactic categories (see Cann
2000). In figure 1, the function word ‘anchors’ the potential category members
{N1…N4} that share certain semantic similarities. Since general categories are
identified by overlapping multiple environments, the overlapping of motif 6 patterns
form an extended motif 204 (figure 2, left).

Figure 2

Figure 2 illustrates (non-exclusively) the environments that precede a noun. For the
nominal category to be posited, potential members must be represented by a single
discrete element. This process is achieved by isomorphism (Steele submitted; see
figure 2, right), where the nodes {N1…N4} are represented by a nominal category.

However, this process unavoidably unleashes a syntactic monster whose members

{the, a, and, of, in, for} do not felicitously combine into a single homologous class.
Recourse to the label of ‘functional category’ is also not admissible. A noun is a
subclass of a lexical category, and so too, the category that captures the member set
{the, a, and, of, in, for} must be a subclass of a functional category. Furthermore,
function words typically resist being generalised due to their highly frequent and
entrenched nature.

This argument extends to other general syntactic categories too. Since one may not
posit a felicitous, general syntactic category without also hypothesising an
inadmissible one, the rejection of general syntactic categories, from this perspective,
is theoretically inevitable.

References

Cann, R. (2000). Functional versus lexical: a cognitive dichotomy. In R.D. Borsley

(Ed), The Nature and Function of Syntactic Categories. Academic Press, 37-78.

Croft, W. (2001). Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological

Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Steele, J.L. A hubterranean view of syntax: An analysis of linguistic form through

network theory. PhD Thesis, EMSAH, University of Queensland, Australia.
Submitted, October 2009.