The Intersection of formal grammar and pragmatics

PARTS OF SPEECH IN A THEORY WITHOUT PROTOTYPES:
THE INTERSECTION OF FORMAL GRAMMAR AND PRAGMATICS
Frederick J. Newmeyer
University of Washington
Many linguists have claimed that parts of speech (POS) have a ‘prototype
structure’. In this talk I dispute that claim. I argue that the interaction of the
discrete parts of speech assumed in most formal approaches to grammar, with
some simple assumptions about the pragmatics of their use, accounts for the
phenomena that have been appealed to in support of prototype theory.
Hopper and Thompson (1985), Croft (1991), and many others associated
with versions of cognitive and functional linguistics have put forward the
following claims:
(1) a. POS are associated in the grammar with semantically definable
‘best case’ (i. e., more prototypical) members and members that systematically
depart from the ‘best case’. For example, for nouns, physical objects are said to be
more prototypical than ideas; for verbs, actions are said to be more prototypical
than states; and for adjectives, properties are said to be more prototypical than
relations.
b. The optimal grammatical description of morphosyntactic processes
involves reference to degree of deviation from the ‘best case’.
They support (1a-b) by arguing that a prototype approach to POS leads,
with minimal additional assumptions, to the following four consequences:
(2) a. Prototypical POS have more morphosyntactic possibilities than
non-prototypical POS. So verbs in many languages admit a wider range of
inflections when they (prototypically) encode actions than when they (nonprototypically)
encode states.
b. A POS that encodes a non-prototypical function is marked by extra
morphemes or unusual behavior. So nouns in English have no derivational suffix
when they (prototypically) encode physical objects, but take nominalizing
suffixes when they (non-prototypically) encode abstract notions like ‘result’ and
‘property’.
c. Universal hierarchies pay attention to the degree of POS
prototypicality. For example, Croft (1990) claims that most grammatical
processes can be described in terms of language-particular cut-off points on these
hierarchies.
d. Lack of prototypicality correlates with categorial instability. So
prototypical adjectives translating as ‘red’ or ‘good’ rarely change category over

time, while attested categorial changes of the non-prototypical adjectives that
translate as ‘like’, ‘worth’, or ‘near’ are common.
I argue that (2a-d), to the extent that they are motivated, can be explained
by (3a-b):
(3) a. POS are discrete, without an internal prototype structure and
without fuzzy boundaries.
b. Prototypicality effects are a consequence of the pragmatics of the
use of POS, rather than of properties inherent to the POS per se.
Consider (2a). Uncontroversially, I would say, concrete nouns (i.e.,
animates and physical objects) make, in general, better topics, better focuses,
better new referents, better established referents, and so on than do abstract
nouns. Actions can be described with respect to a wider array of tense, aspect,
and modality than states. The morphosyntactic accommodation to these facts is a
greater variety of sentence types in which concrete nouns and actions occur than
in which abstract nouns and states occur. There is no reason to appeal directly to
the prototypicality of the noun or the verb.
As far as (2b) is concerned, it has been known since Zipf (1935) that lexical
structure is shaped in part by ‘least-effort’ conditions. Text counts show that
concrete nouns are talked about more than abstractions and that actions are
talked about more than states (Godfrey et al. 1992). Hence it is not surprising that
concrete nouns and actions require less grammatical coding than abstractions
and states respectively. There is no need to build prototypicality into the
structure of the POS per se.
The correctness of (2c) is greatly exaggerated in the cognitive-functional
literature. For example, no absolute hierarchy of prototypicality can explain why the
English progressive is allowed with non-prototypical temporary state and
psychological predicate verbs (4a-b), but disallowed with putatively more prototypical
achievement verbs (5):
(4) a. The portrait is hanging on the wall of the bedroom.
b. I’m enjoying my sabbatical year.
(5) *I’m noticing a diesel fuel truck passing by my window.
To the extent that (2c) is correct, it is a by-product of (2a). Most hierarchies are
epiphenomenal consequences of what can be used as a topic, focus, and so on. For
example, passives are forbidden with measure verbs in English (see 6a-b), not because
measure verbs are low on some hierarchy, but because the measure phrase following
the verb is a predicate, not an argument, and predicates make poor subject topics:
(6) a. The book cost ten dollars.

. *Ten dollars was cost by the book.
My explanation of (2d) involves appeal to mechanisms internal to formal
grammar. For the pragmatic reasons alluded to above, seemingly prototypical
members of a POS have more layers of ‘functional structure’ above them than do
seemingly non-prototypical members. (Functional structure encompasses the
levels of structure representing tense, aspect, modality, topicality, quantifiability,
and so on.) Functional structure is the child language learner’s principal guide to
POS assignment (Radford 1996). Therefore, it follows that when this structure is
reduced, the child has fewer cues as to POS and hence is more likely to posit a
POS assignment that is different from the adult grammar, thereby triggering
language change.
To conclude, it is unnecessary to hypothesize a prototype structure for
POS. Discrete categories and simple assumptions about the pragmatics of use of
POS combine to derive the observed prototype effects.

REFERENCES
Croft, William. 1990. Typology and universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Croft, William. 1991. Syntactic categories and grammatical relations. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Godfrey, J., Holliman, J., and McDaniel, J. 1992. SWITCHBOARD: Telephone
speech corpus for research and development. Paper presented at
Proceedings of ICASSP-92.
Hopper, Paul J., and Thompson, Sandra A. 1985. The iconicity of the universal
categories 'noun' and 'verb'. In Iconicity in syntax, ed. John Haiman, 151-
186. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Radford, Andrew. 1996. Towards a structure-building model of acquisition. In
Generative perspectives on language acquisition: Empirical findings, theoretical
considerations, and crosslinguistic comparisons, ed. Harald Clahsen, 43-89.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Zipf, George. 1935. The psychobiology of language. New York: Houghton Mifflin.