2 - Categories and features
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Overview
In the previous chapter, we saw that the structure dependence principle determines that all grammatical operations in natural language are category-based (so that any word-based operation will apply to whole categories of words rather than to specific individual words). In this chapter, we provide further evidence in support of this conclusion, and argue that a principled description of the grammar of any language (the language chosen for illustrative purposes being Modern Standard English) requires us to recognize that all words in the language belong to a restricted set of grammatical categories. We look at the main categories found in English and explore their nature, arguing that categories are composite elements, built up of sets of grammatical features.
Morphological evidence
A natural question to ask at this point is: ‘What does it mean to say that words belong to grammatical categories?’ We can define a grammatical category in the following way:
(1) A grammatical category is a class of expressions which share a common set of grammatical properties.
For example, by saying that words like boy, cow, hand, idea, place, team, etc. belong to the grammatical category noun, what we are saying is that they all share certain grammatical properties in common: e.g. they have a plural form (ending in the suffix +s), they can all be premodified by the, and so forth. Likewise, by saying that words such as see, know, like, understand, write, appear, etc. belong to the grammatical category verb, what we imply is that they too have certain grammatical properties in common (e.g. they can take the progressive +ing suffix, they can occur after infinitival to, etc.).
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- Information
- Syntactic Theory and the Structure of EnglishA Minimalist Approach, pp. 37 - 85Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997