Syntactic Categories – Diagnostics, Cross-Linguistic Variation & Methodology

Review of Lecture Context

  • Lecturer apologises for lateness & room confusion; microphone needed for recording.
  • Recap of Week 1:
    • Syntax = study of word/phrase arrangement AND the relations/dependencies among them.
    • Two intertwined dimensions of grammar:
    1. Structural/positional rules.
    2. Functional/dependency relations.
    • Word‐order variation shows language‐specific rules (e.g. English “the child chased the dog” vs Ungarranggu* “dog child chased”).
    • Some languages encode “who does what” via morphology rather than position.

Core Theme of Today: Syntactic Categories (Word Classes)

  • Fundamental building blocks of sentences = words → grouped by syntactic categories (aka word classes / lexical categories / parts of speech).
  • Rationale:
    • Different words show parallel behaviour in distribution & morphology.
    • Treating them as similar aids description & theory construction.

Problems with Purely Semantic Definitions

  • Traditional school grammar: “noun = person/place/thing”, “verb = action”, “adjective = describing word”, etc.
    • Quickly fails:
    • “happiness” is abstract yet behaves like a noun (possessable, can be subject).
    • “assassination”, “schoolhouse” ≠ simple persons/places.
  • Evidence from other languages:
    • Irish “doctor” acts as a verb morphologically (takes tense & agreement).
    • Walpiri* (Western Desert) word for “small” can function as sentence subject, showing noun-like case marking.

Distributional/Structural Approach

  • Key Principle: Category is determined by a word’s distribution (internal + external properties), not meaning alone.
  • Internal (morphological) diagnostics:
    • Derivational affixes (change class) → e.g. “happy” + “-ness” ⇒ noun.
    • Inflectional paradigms (tense, number, case, etc.).
  • External (syntactic) diagnostics:
    • Dependents it licenses (modifiers, arguments, determiners, relative clauses).
    • Functions the phrase can fill (subject, object, adjunct, head of PP, etc.).
  • Method illustrated with the nonce word “flug”:
    1. Check for familiar derivational endings.
    2. Test inflections: \text{flug} \to \text{flugs}? \text{flugged}?
    3. Frame in contexts: “the flug”, “quick flug”, “John flugs”, “quickly flugs”, etc.
  • Humorous English ambiguity: “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”
    • Same orthography “flies”; category distinguished by distribution (verb vs noun) & morphology (plural –s vs past –ew).

Language-Specific Nature of Categories

  • English nouns vs Ungarranggu nouns:
    • English: number marking (-s), limited case (pronouns), determiners precede noun.
    • Ungarranggu: no number marking, rich \approx 14 case suffixes (ergative, locative, associative, instrumental, …), demonstratives follow noun, possession possible.
    • Shared behaviours (can be possessed, modified) justify same label “noun” but criteria differ.
  • Syntactician’s task: discover & justify categories for each language dataset; cannot import English diagnostics wholesale.

Typological & Ontological Tendencies

  • Cross-linguistic clustering around semantic ontology but NOT deterministic.
    • Broad mapping: events → verbs (predicates); entities → nouns (arguments); properties → adjectives/adverbs (modifiers).
    • Counter-examples common: English “funeral” (event noun), Ungarranggu “small” (property noun).
  • Degree of category inventory:
    • Some languages proposed with 1 category (e.g. Cayuga, arguable): every lexical item takes agreement/tense.
    • 2-way split (noun vs verb) more common.
    • 3-way (adds adjectives); 4-way (adds adverbs) typical of many familiar languages.

Open vs Closed Classes

  • Open: potentially limitless membership, productive morphology (nouns, verbs, adjectives).
  • Closed: small fixed sets, idiosyncratic behaviour (determiners, pronouns, adpositions, auxiliaries, particles).

Sub-Classification within Major Classes

  • Example: English count vs mass nouns (“butter” lacks plural -s).
  • Subclasses arise when only a subset bears certain diagnostics.

Cross-Linguistic Variation in Nouns

Proper vs Common Nouns

  • English: determiners/plurals restricted with proper names (*“the Questacon”, *“several Questacons” unless semantically coerced).
  • Cebuano (Philippines): distinct actor/patient particles for names:
    • Actor: si (proper), ang (common).
    • Patient: ni (proper), sa (common).

Noun Class (Gender) Systems

  • Chichewa (Bantu): 18 noun classes (≈ genders); agreement prefixes on verbs/adjectives/pronouns vary by class & number.
    • e.g. Class 7 corn “chimanga” ⇒ verb object marker “chi-”.
    • Class 3 lion “mkango” ⇒ object marker “u-”.
  • Distinction between class/gender (agreement-triggering property of noun) vs case (morphological marking of syntactic role).

Possession Typology

  • Inalienable vs alienable possession (Matukar Panau, PNG):
    • Inalienable (body parts, kin): suffix on noun → “hand-2SG” = “your hand”.
    • Alienable (transferable objects): separate possessive particle → “your house”.
    • English shows hints of dual strategy (pre-nominal ’s vs “of” phrase), but not grammatically obligatory like some languages.

Practical Methodology for Analysis & Assignments

  1. Collect maximal data: paradigms, sentence frames, acceptability judgements.
  2. Identify internal markers (affixes, stem alternations).
  3. Map external distribution: allowed dependents, syntactic roles.
  4. Seek clustering → propose categories and possible subclasses.
  5. Support with multiple converging diagnostics; avoid sole reliance on meaning.
  6. Remember: criteria & labels are language-specific; use cross-linguistic tendencies only as heuristics.

Take-Home Summary

  • Categories are defined by behavior (morphology & syntax), not by inherent meaning.
  • Each language carves up the lexical space uniquely, though broad semantic correlations recur universally.
  • Syntacticians must justify category assignments empirically, triangulating diverse evidence.
  • Understanding variation (case vs agreement, alienable possession, noun classes, etc.) sharpens one’s analytic toolkit.
  • Next lecture will extend from words to phrases (building constituency and phrase structure).