PARTS OF

SPEECH
CHAPTER #2
 WORDS AND WHY THEY MATTER
TO SYNTAX

 It goes without saying that sentences are made up of words, so before we get into the syntactic
core, it’s worth looking carefully at different kinds of words.
 part of speech (also known as syntactic category or word class).
 The most common parts of speech are nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions
(we will also look at some other, less familiar parts of speech later ).
 Parts of speech tell us how a word is going to function in the sentence.
 1) a) The man loved peanut butter cookies.

b) The puppy loved peanut butter cookies.

c) The king loved peanut butter cookies.
However, we cannot substitute words that aren’t nouns:
2) a) *The green loved peanut butter cookies.
b) *The in loved peanut butter cookies.
c) *The sing loved peanut butter cookies.
The same holds true for larger groups of words (the square brackets [ … ] mark off the relevant groups of
words).
3) a) [John] went to the store.
b) [The man] went to the store.
c) *[Quickly walks] went to the store.
If we have categories for words that can appear in certain positions and categories for those that don’t, we
can make generalizations (scientific ones) about the behavior of different word types. This is why we need
parts of speech in syntactic theory.
 DETERMINING PART OF SPEECH
The Problem of Traditional Definitions
If you were taught any grammar in school, you may have been told that:
a noun is a “person, place, or thing”,
a verb is “an action, state, or state of being”.
This is a very over-simplistic way to characterize various parts of speech.
It also isn’t terribly scientific or accurate. The first thing to notice about definitions like this is
that they are based on semantic criteria. It doesn’t take much effort to find counterexamples to
these semantic definitions. Consider the following:
The destruction of the city bothered the Mongols.

The meaning of destruction is not a “person, place, or thing”.

It is an action. By semantic criteria, this word should be a verb. But in fact, native speakers
unanimously identify it as a noun.
 Sincerity is an important quality.

Sincerity is an attribute, a property normally associated with adjectives. Yet sincerity is a noun.

Distributional Criteria
The criteria we use for determining part of speech then aren’t based on the meanings of the word,
but on its distribution.

We will use two kinds of distributional tests for determining part of speech: morphological
distribution and syntactic distribution.
morphological distribution; this refers to the kinds of affixes (prefixes and suffixes) and other
morphology that appear on a word.

Let’s consider two different types of affixes.

First, we have affixes that make words out of other words. We call these affixes derivational
morphemes. These suffixes usually result in a different part of speech from the word they attach
to. For example, if we take the word distribute, we can add the derivational suffix -(t)ion and we
get the noun distribution.

A similar example is found with the affix -al, which creates adjectives. If we take distribution, and add -al to it, we
get the adjective distributional. The -al ending is a test for being an adjective.
Derivational affixes make a word a particular category; by contrast inflectional morphemes don’t make a
word into a particular category, but instead only attach to certain categories. Take for example the
superlative suffix -est.

This affix only attaches to words that are already adjectives: big, biggest.

Because they are sensitive to what category they attach to, inflectional suffixes can also serve as a test for
determining part of speech category.

The other kind of test we use for determining part of speech uses syntactic distribution.

Syntactic distribution refers to what other words appear near the word. For example, nouns typically
appear after determiners (articles) such as the, although they need not do so to be nouns. We can thus take
appearance after the to be a test for noun-hood.
 THE MAJOR PARTS OF SPEECH: N, V, ADJ, AND ADV
We are going to use distributional criteria for determining the part of speech of a word, we’ll now
turn to some tests for particular lexical items.

The major classes of noun (N), verb (V), adjective (Adj), and adverb (Adv).
NOTE:
One thing that you’ll notice is that these are specific to English. Every language will have its own
distributional criteria.

Nouns:
Derivational Suffixes: In English, nouns often end in derivational endings such as -ment (basement), -
ness (friendliness), -ity (sincerity), -ty (certainty), -(t)ion (devotion), -ation (expectation), -ist
(specialist), -ant (attendant), -ery (shrubbery), -ee (employee), -ship (hardship), -aire (billionaire), -acy
(advocacy), -let (piglet), -ling (underling), -hood (neighborhood), -ism (socialism), -ing (fencing).
Inflectional Suffixes: Nouns in English don’t show much inflection, but when pluralized can
take suffixes such as -s (cats), -es (glasses), -en (oxen), -ren (children.

Syntactic Distribution:
Nouns often appear after determiners such as the, those, these (e.g., these peanuts), and can appear after
adjectives (the big peanut).

Nouns can also follow prepositions (in school).

All of these conditions can happen together (in the big gymnasium).

Nouns can appear as the subject of the sentence :

The syntax paper was incomprehensible; or as the direct object: I read the syntax paper.
Nouns can be negated by no (as opposed to not or un-): No apples were eaten.
One easy way to see if something is a noun is to see if you can replace it with another word that is clearly a
noun.
If we want to see if the word people is a noun or not, we can substitute another word we know for sure to be a
noun, e.g.,(John) in I saw people running all over the place vs. I saw John running all over the place).
Verbs:
Derivational Suffixes: Verbs often end in derivational endings such as -ate (dissipate), and -ize/-ise
(regularize).
Inflectional Suffixes: In the past tense, verbs usually take an -ed or -t ending.
In the present tense, third person singular (he, she, it), they usually take the -s ending.
Verbs can also take an -ing ending in some aspectual constructions, (she was walking) and most take
either an -en or an -ed suffix when they are passivized:
The ice cream was eaten.

Syntactic Distribution: Verbs can follow auxiliaries and modals such as will, have, having, had, has,
am, be, been, being, is, are, were, was, would, can, could, shall, should, may, must, and the special
non-finite marker to.

Verbs follow subjects, and can follow adverbs such as often and frequently.

Verbs can be negated with not (as opposed to no and un ).

Adjectives:
Derivational Suffixes: Adjectives often end in derivational endings such as -ing (the dancing cat), -ive
(indicative), -able (readable), -al (traditional),-ate (intimate), -ish (childish), -some (tiresome), -ful
(wishful), -less (selfless), -ly (friendly).

Inflectional Suffixes: Adjectives can be inflected into a comparative form using -er (alternately they
follow the word more).

They can also be inflected into their superlative form using -est (alternately they follow the word
most).

Adjectives are typically negated using the prefix un- (in its sense meaning “not”, not in its sense
meaning “undo”).
Syntactic Distribution: Adjectives can appear between determiners such as the, a, these, etc. and
nouns (the big peanut).
They also can follow the auxiliary am/is/are/was/were/be/been/being ( warning: this distribution overlaps
with verbs).
Frequently, adjectives can be modified by the adverb very ( warning: this distribution overlaps with adverbs )
Adverbs:
Derivational Suffixes: Many adverbs end in -ly: quickly, frequently, etc.

Inflectional Suffixes: Adverbs generally don’t take any inflectional suffixes. However, on rare
occasions they can be used comparatively and follow the word more:
She went more quickly than he did.
Adverbs typically don’t take the prefix un- unless the adjective they are derived from does first
(e.g., unhelpfully from unhelpful, but *unquickly, *unquick).

Syntactic Distribution: The syntactic distribution of adverbs is most easily described by stating
where they can’t appear.

Adverbs can’t appear between a determiner and a noun (*the quickly fox) or after the verb is and its
variants.

They can really appear pretty much anywhere else in the sentence, although typically they appear at
either the beginning or the end of the clause/sentence.

Frequently, like adjectives, they can be modified by the adverb very.

 OPEN VS. CLOSED; LEXICAL VS.
FUNCTIONAL
Open vs. Closed Parts of Speech
Some parts of speech allow you to add neologisms (new words).
New words may be coined at any time, if they are open class (e.g., fax, internet, google, email).

By contrast there are some parts of speech that don’t allow new forms.
Suppose I wanted to describe a situation where one arm is under the table and another is over
the table, and I called this new preposition uvder:
My arms are * uvder the table.
It’s fairly unlikely that my new preposition, no matter how useful it is, will be adopted into the
language.

Parts of speech that allow new members are said to be open class.
Those that don’t (or where coinages are very rare) are closed class.

All of the cases that we’ve looked at so far have been open class parts of speech.
Lexical vs. Functional:

Lexical parts of speech provide the “content” of the sentence.

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are all lexical parts of speech.

Functional parts of speech, by contrast, provide the grammatical information.

Functional items are the “glue” that holds a sentence together.

Some Functional (Closed) Categories of English:

prepositions (abbreviated P).

Prepositions appear before nouns (or more precisely, noun phrases).

English prepositions include the following:

Prepositions of English (P):

to, from, under, over, with, by, at, above, before, after, through, near, on, off, for, in,
into, of, during, across, without, since, until.

The class of determiners (D):

is a little broader. It contains a number of subcategories including articles, quantifiers,
numerals, deictics, and possessive pronouns.

Determiners appear at the very beginning of English noun phrases.

Determiners of English (D)
a) Articles: the, a, an
b) Deictic articles: this, that, these, those, yon
c) Quantifiers: every, some, many, most, few, all, each, any, less, fewer, no
d) (Cardinal) numerals: one, two, three, four, etc.
e) Possessive pronouns: my, your, his, her, its, our, their
f) Some wh-question words: which, whose
Conjunctions (Conj) are words that connect two or more phrases together on an equal
level:

Conjunctions of English (Conj):

and, or, nor, neither … nor, either …

The class of complementizers (C) also connects structures together, but they embed one clause
inside of another instead of keeping them on an equal level:

Complementizers of English (C): that, for, if, whether One of the most important categories that
we’ll use is the category of tense (T). T consists of auxiliaries, modals, and Preliminaries the non-
finite tense marker. In the older syntactic literature, the category T is sometimes called Infl
(inflection) or Aux (Auxiliary). We’ll use the more modern T.

Tense categories of English (T):

Auxiliaries: have/has/had, am/is/are/was/were, do/does/did

Modals: will, would, shall, should, can, could, may, might, must
Non-finite tense marker: to
There is one special category containing only one word: not, which will be called negation (Neg).

There are other categories that express negation (e.g., the determiners no, any, and the noun none).

The category Neg will be reserved for the word not.

 SUBCATEGORIES AND FEATURES
In the previous slides, we noticed that each major part of speech category may have subtypes.

For example, we listed six different kinds of D (articles, deictics, quantifiers, numerals, possessive
pronouns, wh-pronouns)

three kinds of T (auxiliaries, modals, and the non-finite marker).

 The technical term for these subtypes is subcategories.

 For the most part, we are going to be interested in the main part of speech categories (N, V,
Adj, Adv, P, D, Conj, C, T, and Neg), but sometimes we will want to refer to the subcategories.
One way to mark subcategories is through the use of features.

Consider the case of T. To distinguish among the subcategories we can appeal to the
features [±modal] and [±non-finite]

Similarly, we can distinguish among tense forms using features like [±past] etc.
was is [+past]; is is [-past] etc.

Similarly, we can distinguish among the various kinds of determiner using features like
[±wh], [±quantifier], [±deictic], etc.
Subcategories of Nouns:

plural vs. singular[±PLURAL] , proper vs. common, pronoun vs. lexical noun, and count vs. mass noun.

proper names and common nouns. Proper names are nouns like Hala Hamed.
Common nouns are all other nouns.

For the most, part proper names resist taking determiners:

The subcategories of pronouns and anaphors. These classes differ from the others in that they are
closed.

They never allow determiners or adjectival modification.

a) he b) himself
c) *the he d) *the himself Pronouns belong to the class [+PRONOUN, –ANAPHOR].
e) *big he f) *big himself Anaphors are [+PRONOUN, +ANAPHOR].
All other nouns are [–PRONOUN, –ANAPHOR].
Subcategories of Verbs:

There are two major ways in which we can divide up verbs into subcategories.

 One is along the lines of tense/finiteness (i.e., whether the verb is left, leaves, (will) leave or
(to) leave).

 The other way to divvy up verbs is in terms of the number of noun phrases (NPs) and
prepositional phrases (PPs) or clauses (CPs) they require.

This second kind of division is known as argument structure.

In order to discuss argument structure, we first need to define some basic terms.
If you took grammar in school, you probably learned that “every sentence has a subject and a
predicate.” Under your schoolroom definitions, the subject is usually the first noun phrase (that is, the
first noun and all things that go along with it), and the predicate is everything else in the sentence.
 The scary dog chased my neighbor's cat

So for example, in the sentence above, the subject is the scary dog , and the predicate would be
chased my neighbor's cat.

[The scary dog ][chased my neighbor's cat].

subject predicate (traditional definitions)

syntacticians use the term “predicate” entirely differently.

The syntactician’s definition of predicate is based on the mathematical notion of a “relation”. The
predicate defines the relation between the individuals being talked about and the real world – as well
as among themselves. The entities (which can be abstract) participating in the relation are called
arguments.
To see how this works, look at the following example:

Gwen hit the baseball.

There are two arguments in this example, Gwen and the baseball. These are elements in the world that are
participants in the action described by the sentence. The predicate here is hit. Hit expresses a relation
between the two arguments: more precisely, it indicates that the first argument (Gwen) is applying some
force on the second argument (the baseball).
√ We can speak about any particular predicate’s argument structure.

√ This refers to the number of arguments that a particular predicate requires.

√ Another name for argument structure is valency.

√ Take, for example, predicates that take only one argument (i.e., they have a valency of 1). These are
predicates like smile, arrive, sit, run, etc.

√ The property of transitivity refers to how many arguments follow the verb.
In predicates with a valency of 1, no arguments follow the verb (the single argument precedes the verb), so
these predicates are said to be intransitive.

√ Predicates that take two obligatory arguments have a valency of 2; some examples are hit, love, see, kiss,
admire, etc.
√ These predicates are said to be transitive, because they have a single argument after the verb (the other
argument precedes the verb). Finally
√ predicates that take three arguments have a valency of 3. Put and give are the best examples of this class.
√ These predicates have two arguments after the verb so are said to be ditransitive.
In determining how many arguments a predicate has, we only consider the obligatory NPs
and PPs. Optional ones are never counted in the list of arguments. Only obligatory
elements are considered arguments.
Predicates not only restrict the number of arguments that appear with them, they also restrict the
categories of those arguments.
A verb like ask can take either an NP or a clause (embedded sentence = CP) as a complement:

a)I asked [NP the question]. b)I asked [CP if you knew the answer].
But a verb like hit can only take an NP complement:

a)I hit [NP the ball]. b) *I hit [CP that you knew the answer].

Intransitives require a single NP subject. We’ll mark this with the feature [NP ___ ] where the
underscore represents where the verb would go in the sentence. An example of such a verb would be
leave. [NPShe left ]
Most transitive verbs require an NP object, so we can mark these with the feature [NP ___ NP]. An
example of this is the verb hit.

Verbs like ask, think, say, etc. allow either an NP object or a CP (embedded clause) object.

We can mark this using curly brackets { } and a slash. {NP/CP} means “a choice of NP or CP”.

√ The feature structure for predicates like this is [NP __ {NP/CP}].

Ditransitive verbs come in several major types:

Some ditransitive verbs require two NP objects (the first is an indirect object, the other a direct object).
The verb spare is of this category.

It does not allow an NP and a PP:

a) I spared [NP him] [NP the trouble].
b) *I spared [NP the trouble] [PP to him].

This category of ditransitive is marked with the feature [NP __ NP NP].

The opposite kind of ditransitive is found with the verb put.

Put requires an NP and a PP:

a) *I put [NP the box] [NP the book].
b) I put [NP the book] [PP in the box].

This kind of ditransitive takes the feature [NP __ NP PP]

Ditransitive verbs that appear to be a combination of these two types and allow either an NP
or a PP in the second position:

a) I gave [NP the box] [PP to Leah].

b) I gave [NP Leah] [NP the box].

These have the feature [NP ___ NP {NP/PP}].

Finally, we have ditransitive verbs that take either two NPs, or one NP and one CP, or an NP and a
PP:
a) I told [NP Daniel] [NP the story].
b) I told [NP Daniel] [CP that the exam was cancelled].
c) I told [NP the story] [PP to Daniel].

Verbs like tell have the feature [NP __ NP {NP/PP/CP}].

The following chart summarizes all the different subcategories of verb we’ve discussed:
 CONCLUSIO
N
In this chapter, we’ve surveyed the parts of speech categories that we will use in this course. We have
the lexical parts of speech N, V, Adj, and Adv, and the functional categories D, P, C, Conj, Neg, and T.

Determining part of speech is done not by traditional semantic criteria, but by using morphological and
syntactic distribution tests.

We also looked at distributional evidence for various subcategories of nouns and verbs, and represented
these distinctions as feature notations on the major categories.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR
ATTENTION