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Asian 401
Syntactic Categories
= Word Classes = Parts of Speech
All languages have syntactic
categories. The syntactic category of
a word determines the role it can play
in a sentence.
Only a noun can complete the sentence
“Give a __________ to me.”
Lexical vs. Nonlexical
Noun Determiner (a, the,
Verb this, etc.)
Adjective Conjunction (and,
Preposition or, but, etc.)
Degree word (too,
Adverb
very, etc.)
Clearly identifiable
Functional
meanings
Identifying Categories
Native speakers may have a good
intuition about the syntactic category
of a word.
But linguists require more objective
ways of determining syntactic
categories.
There are two tests one can use:
Test 1: Inflection
Certain inflectional paradigms apply
only to one syntactic category.
For example, if a word can take the
inflectional suffix -ed in English, it
must belong to the verb category.
Problem 1: What about sing?
Problem 2: Analytic languages
Test 2: Distribution
The words with which a word may co-
occur can be used to determine its
syntactic category.
Example: only nouns can come after a
or the in English.
All languages have such distributional
restrictions on syntactic categories.
Other languages
Different languages have different
syntactic categories.
Some Asian languages have no
adjectives. They have verbs meaning
“to be red”, “to be happy”, etc.
Many Asian languages have a syntactic
category called classifier.
Classifiers
Also called measure words.
In Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese,
Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, etc.
Co-occur with counted nouns
Examples: “one student”, “two
students”; “one book”, “two books”
Different classifiers co-occur with
different nouns
Distribution tests
Distribution tests for syntactic
categories are different in all
languages.
Chinese has no articles like a, the. So
you can’t test for nouns with them.
But in Chinese, only nouns co-occur
with classifiers. If a word can come
after a classifier, it must be a noun.
Sentence Structure
Recall from morphology that words are
not simply strings of morphemes. They
have a hierarchical structure that we
can represent with trees.
devaporize
vaporize
NP (Subject) VP (Predicate)
NP VP
N V
Bill swam
More complex sentence 1
S
NP VP
Det N V
N V (head) NP (comp)
N
John speaks English
[Subject] [Verb] [Object]
SOV (Japanese)
S
NP VP
NP (comp) V (head)
N (head) PP (complement)
Prep NP
N
boy from Tacoma
NP (complement-head)
NP
complement N (head)