LINB06H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Complementizer, Part Of Speech, Syntactic Category
16 Sep 2016
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A sentence is a string of linearized words. Words belong to parts of speech (syntactic categories). In english, there are 10 syntactic categories, divided into 2 subgroups: Lexical (major) categories: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions: infinite words, new words can be added (ex. Functional (minor) categories: determiner, pronoun, tense, conjunction/complementizer, negation: finite number of words, no new words can be added, no semantic meaning. There are 3 criteria that force us to split language into syntactic categories. Inventory: lexical categories form an open/unlimited class, functional is limited. Productivity: creating and adding new words in the lexical category class is frequent. Semantic content: lexical categories are semantically meaningful whereas functional categories are not. Determining syntactic categories: morphological distribution: recall affixes. Un-, re-), suffixes attach to the end (ex. Derivational affixes: change word to new category. Er" in runner": run + -er = runner, verb + -er = noun.
