zompist wrote: ↑Mon Jan 24, 2022 3:37 am
All that being said, I still believe it should be possible to find syntactic tests (or combinations of tests) which can isolate ‘noun’ and ‘verb’ as distinct word classes, since (in English at least) they’re fundamentally syntactic concepts.
You can do pretty well with morphology: English verbs can be inflected for past tense (and 3s, and progressive); nouns can be inflected by number. Though this test won't work in all cases-- e.g. in N+N compounds the first noun usually can't be inflected; verbs don't inflect in non-finite clauses, etc.
I actually did think of this noun test; unfortunately it only works as a test for count nouns, since mass nouns have no plural. And then there’s words like
fish or
sheep, where the number inflection is not overt. (Hmm, is that the right word? Probably not.) Morphological tests seem to work better for verbs than for nouns in English — I assume this is related to the cross-linguistic generalisation that verbs tend to have more morphology.
Other categories are worse-- not all adjectives inflect; adverbs / prepositions / conjunctions have no morphology.
Adjectives are an interesting, since depending on the language they can act either like nouns or like verbs. In English, they act exactly like nouns, except they can’t head an indefinite noun phrase. This would be fine for François, since he accepts this sort of thing as a criterion, but I feel uncomfortable for the already mentioned reasons. I still haven’t worked out good tests for the other word classes.
The construction in ‘under $5’ and ‘over 70°’ can really only be used nominally with those two prepositions;
When I can come up with counterexamples in a minute of thinking, that should make you look widely at more examples and refine your analysis, not double down on your initial idea. More examples of 'the' + preposition: the below zero weather, the on edge actors, the after action report, the around the world trip, the by the book cop. Try to think of examples yourself rather than trying to shoot down counterevidence!
I never ‘doubled down’ — for reasons of accuracy I pointed out that some ‘counterexamples’ weren’t, but I also noted that many others were valid. I agree with you that my analysis was wrong. That being said, even if that one attempt turned out to be wrong, I still believe that with the right syntactic tests, this approach will work: there is surely
some sort of difference in syntax which distinguishes English nouns from verbs and adjectives.
(You might argue that this hypothesis is unfalsifiable, in the Popperian sense. And this would be true! But truly falsifiable hypotheses are hard to come by in syntax.)
I had a boss who liked to have "come to Jesus meetings"-- this refers to revival meetings, and he thought they were inspirational. (They weren't.) Again, you could take a minute and think of a dozen more examples. The dance all night crowd, the go all out maneuver, the find all the things playthrough.
After thinking about these for a bit, I’m not quite sure how to analyse them. Phonologically, they seem to be single words: I pronounce ‘find all the things’ faster and with more phonological reduction (e.g. /d/-flapping) as a modifier than as a VP, though I have yet to properly confirm this on a spectrogram. Then again, phonological wordhood is irrelevant to my argument. Syntactically, at first I thought they might be just adjectival compounds, but they don’t behave like proper adjectives: *
the playthrough was find all the things vs
the playthrough was quick.
Well, I’ve yet to see any good arguments that auxiliaries are verbs in any way; the best you can do is to say that some auxiliaries can also be used like verbs, and inflect for third person like verbs. And even that argument says nothing about auxiliaries like ‘must’ and ‘can’, which synchronically have completely distinct behaviour to verbs.
You could track down McCawley's syntax book, which is excellent anyway. But really, "auxiliaries can behave a lot like verbs" isn't exactly a strong argument that auxiliaries aren't verbs. "Be" and "have" inflect like verbs, head a VP like verbs, can be negated like verbs, and don't act like nouns or adjectives. Modals are less like verbs but have at least some of these features. You can separate out most verbs based on other behavior-- mostly, that they require Do-support. But that doesn't tell you if the best analysis is that verbs are a narrow or broad category.
Sorry; I phrased my argument badly there. Emphasis should be on the
some in ‘some auxiliaries can also be used like verbs, and inflect for third person like verbs: the set is pretty much limited to ‘be’, ‘have’ and ‘do’. But as for the other auxiliaries—‘must’, ‘can’, ‘may’, ‘shall’ and all the rest—I’m still waiting to see what verby behaviour they have.
(Also, would McCawley’s book be
The Syntactic Phenomena of English? You’ve recommended that before, so perhaps I’ll try to find a copy. Hmm, I’m going on campus this week; I wonder if the uni library will have a copy…)
But I still find it hard to see how prototype theory could even be applied to a purely formal concept like word classes. I just don’t understand how a single word can be halfway between a noun and a verb, as you imply is possible — either it behaves formally like a noun and hence is a noun, or it behaves formally like a verb and hence is a verb, or it behaves in some ways similarly to nouns and in some ways similarly to verbs, in which case it is neither a noun nor a verb and is in a third word class altogether.
OK, take "reading." It can be used as a noun: "reading is fun." It can be used as a verb: "I am reading Tolstoy."
And that's without bringing in other languages, where participles have a bad habit of
becoming verb forms. You can perhaps claim that "reading" is not a verb in English, but is читал not a verb? It's how you form the Russian past tense.
Gerunds such as ‘reading’ are an interesting case. I’d analyse them as an entirely separate word class, which shares all the properties of nouns, most (but not all!) the properties of verbs, and has some new properties of its own — the latter fact being entirely ignored by any analysis which merely calls them ‘something between a noun and a verb’. (My words, not yours, but you seem to agree with that assessment.) As for the Russian example, I know too little to comment there.
And sure, confronted with a continuum of behaviors, you can split them all up and give them new names. Sometimes that's the right move! But you may also end up with several dozen categories with arbitrary and confusing names. There's no guarantee that the splitting process will end up with a small, easily understood set of categories.
Of course! Given a continuum, this would be for the most part senseless. But as I have argued, word classes do not form a continuum. At least in English, there is no set of words which gradually fades from prototypical nouns to half-noun-half-verbs to prototypical verbs in the same way as, say, affixes fade from inflectional to derivational, or aspectual categories fade from perfective to stative to imperfective, or alignments fade from nominative-accusative to split ergative to ergative-absolutive. And therefore, it is entirely reasonable to split words up into as many classes as necessary so that we aren’t conflating separate concepts.
I suppose I should elaborate on exactly
why I think word classes differ from these other continua. It is because the defining properties of those continua are themselves continuous. Consider Dahl’s definition of the prototypical perfective:
Dahl (1985) wrote:
A PFV verb will typically denote a single event, seen as an unanalysed whole, with a well-defined result or end-state, located in the past. More often than not, the event will be punctual, or at least, it will be seen as a single transition from one state to its opposite, the duration of which can be disregarded.
Practically all of these defining categories are continua: single/double/triple/multiple/infinite/neverending events, seen as a whole/without endpoints/in small sections/a single moment, with a well-defined/poorly-defined/no result, and so on. ‘Located in the past’ is the only part of that which might in any way be binary. It is the same with all the other continua in linguistics: for alignment, for instance, it goes from all A unmarked+no P unmarked, to inanimate A marked+non-inanimate P marked, to non-human A unmarked+human P unmarked, and so on and so forth until we get to no A unmarked+all P unmarked. (Note that this is a more complex continuum: there is more than one way to get from the start to the end!)
With word classes, however, our only, or at least main, tool is morphosyntactic behaviour — you seem to agree with me on this. And morphosyntactic behaviour is binary: either a word fits in a construction/takes a specific affix, or it does not. There is no continuum here. When we start combining syntactic tests (‘Hiw numerals are words which can head modifier phrases
and modify argument phrases
and head TAM-inflected predicates
and head direct predicates’), then it gets a bit easier to define continuum-like things, since we can imagine all possible combinations of those binary conditions — but it’s very rare, probably unattested, for a language to have words which fill in
all possible binary combinations, and in any case that would still a lot more discrete than the average linguistic continuum.
(I have a horrible feeling the underlying problem here is differing mental models: when I think of word class definitions, I literally think of little switches in a table toggling on and off. I’m not sure exactly how you think of word classes, but it’s probably different. My posts here have just been arguing that my mental model is a correct way to think about things. I’m not sure if there’s any way to resolve these differences, at least via text over the Internet.)
You say "‘Syntactic class X’ is merely a shorthand for saying that ‘words belonging to X are distinguishable by sharing such-and-such traits’. In any given language, there should be very few words which do not fit into one or more word classes." These are both dubious propositions and are not really supported by François’s paper.
I mean... how does a grid of binary features provide a better explanation? All a list of features provides is, well, a list of features. If you get a gradation in the features, it provides no explanation for that.