《4.chapter2POS》.pdf

Parts of Speech 0. WORDS AND WHY THEY MATTER TO SYNTAX It goes without saying that sentences are made up of words, so before we get into the meat of this book, it’s worth looking carefully at different kinds of words. What is most important to us here is the word’s part of speech (also known as syntactic categ ory). The most common parts of speech are nouns, verbs, adj ectives, adverbs, and prepositions (we will also look at some other less familiar parts of speech below). Parts of speech tell us how a word is going to function in the sentence. Consider the sentences in (1). Notice that we can substitute various words that are of the type noun for the second word 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:1 2) a) *The green loved peanut butter cookies. b) *The in loved peanut butter cookies. c) *The sing loved peanut butter cookies. 1 Remember, the * symbol means that a sentence is syntactically ill-formed. 36 Preliminaries 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. 4) a) [Norvel] kissed the blarney stone. b) *[To the washroom] kissed the blarney stone. 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 . 1. DETERMINING PART OF SPEECH 1.1