Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics.pdf

A-Z 865lack thereof is the cause for the diverging analyses of many grammarians: (a)morphology: the distinction between inflected (noun, adjective, verb, pronoun) and noninflected(adverb, conjunction, preposition) words; (b) syntax: for example, the ability tomodify nominal or verbal elements (adjective vs adverb), to take an article (noun vspronoun), to require a certain case of nouns or pronouns through government(preposition vs conjunction); (c) semantics: conceptualcategorial aspects—the threebasic parts of speech, noun, adjective and verb, are based on the logical categories‘substance,’ ‘property,’ and ‘process,’ while conjunctions and prepositions are based onthe category ‘relation.’Most of the criticism of parts of speech is directed at the unevenness of theclassificatory criteria, which are partially contradictory or overlapping, for example, thenumerals, which on the basis of common lexical features (= terms for numbers andquantities) form an independent group, while the individual representatives behavesyntactically as nouns (thousands of people), adjectives (one book), indefinite pronouns(many), or adverbs (He called twice). In addition, words can change historically from onecategory to another through conversion.It must be remembered that words which sound the same due to homophony mustoften be assigned to different parts of speech according to usage, e.g. sound, which canoccur as a noun (a loud sound), a verb (to sound like…), and an adjective (a soundreason). In generative transformational grammar, the classification followsdistributional criteria: all linguistic units which are interchangeable in the deep structurefor the same lexical constituent belong to the same category. In categorial grammar,however, only the nouns form an independent category, all other categories being definedaccording to the way and manner they, combined with nouns, form sentences.ReferencesMagnusson, R. 1954. Studies in the theory of the parts of speech. Lund.Shopen, T. (ed.) 1985. Language typology and syntactic description, vol. 3: Grammaticalcategories and the lexicon. Cambridge.part-whole relation (also partonymy relation)Semantic relation between linguistic expressions that designates the relation of a part tothe whole or possessive relations: A possesses B. The part-whole relation is very similarto inclusion. Like true inclusion, it is asymmetric; but unlike inclusion, it is not transitive,e.g. An arm has a hand and A hand has five fingers, but not *An arm has five fingers (symmetrical relation, transitive relation). Selection restrictions between certain verbs(have, possess) and different noun classes (A cat has a long tail, but not *A long tail hasa cat) cannot be described in componential analysis with binary features, but rather onlywith relational features.