Lexical categories for beginners?

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zompist
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Re: Lexical categories for beginners?

Post by zompist »

Terra wrote:
"The man went therefore the woman went too."
This is different. You are no longer joining 2 nouns, but 2 clauses.

Examples:
(Joining 2 nouns)
Good: The man and the woman are hungry.
Good: (Either) the man or the woman is hungry.
Bad: The man but the woman are/is hungry.
Bad: The man therefore the woman are/is hungry.

(Joining 2 clauses)
Good: The man is hungry, and the woman is thirsty.
Good: (Either) the man is hungry, or the the woman is thirsty.
Good: The man is hungry, but the woman is thirsty.
Good: The man is hungry, therefore the woman is thirsty.

"but" looks like it's the same PoS as "therefore", not "and" or "or". Furthermore, it doesn't make sense to label "and" and "or" as a single PoS. Instead, I would say that they can be one of two PoS depending on the situation.
However, consider:

I didn't see the man, but the woman. (NP conj NP)
*I didn't see the man, therefore the woman.
Worship no god but Allah.
*Worship no god therefore Allah.
He didn't fall off but was pushed. (VP conj VP)
*He didn't fall off therefore was pushed.
He loves me but not you. (NP conj NP)
?He loves me therefore not you.

I don't think "therefore" is a conjunction at all; as I said earlier, it fits into adverb slots.

"But" originally meant "without, outside", thus "except", so the usages like "Worship no god but Allah" (i.e. "except Allah") are the oldest sense, and are really prepositions. Perhaps the simplest explanation is that over centuries it's been moving from preposition to conjunction, but hasn't entirely arrived.

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Re: Lexical categories for beginners?

Post by CaesarVincens »

zompist wrote:
Terra wrote:
"The man went therefore the woman went too."
This is different. You are no longer joining 2 nouns, but 2 clauses.

Examples:
(Joining 2 nouns)
Good: The man and the woman are hungry.
Good: (Either) the man or the woman is hungry.
Bad: The man but the woman are/is hungry.
Bad: The man therefore the woman are/is hungry.

(Joining 2 clauses)
Good: The man is hungry, and the woman is thirsty.
Good: (Either) the man is hungry, or the the woman is thirsty.
Good: The man is hungry, but the woman is thirsty.
Good: The man is hungry, therefore the woman is thirsty.

"but" looks like it's the same PoS as "therefore", not "and" or "or". Furthermore, it doesn't make sense to label "and" and "or" as a single PoS. Instead, I would say that they can be one of two PoS depending on the situation.
However, consider:

I didn't see the man, but the woman. (NP conj NP)
*I didn't see the man, therefore the woman.
Worship no god but Allah.
*Worship no god therefore Allah.
He didn't fall off but was pushed. (VP conj VP)
*He didn't fall off therefore was pushed.
He loves me but not you. (NP conj NP)
?He loves me therefore not you.

I don't think "therefore" is a conjunction at all; as I said earlier, it fits into adverb slots.

"But" originally meant "without, outside", thus "except", so the usages like "Worship no god but Allah" (i.e. "except Allah") are the oldest sense, and are really prepositions. Perhaps the simplest explanation is that over centuries it's been moving from preposition to conjunction, but hasn't entirely arrived.
I think a good modern comparison of a conjunction-preposition confusion is "than". (Also "because")

In any case, I think it is better to refer to conjunctions as only those things which join two like XPs together and to refer to other so-called conjunctions which introduce subordinate clauses as complementizers (or another term at least).

Whatever "therefore" is, it isn't a conjunction under those definitions. Neither are any of 'because', 'before', 'until', or other such subordinators.

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Re: Lexical categories for beginners?

Post by Salmoneus »

I think your examples there are mostly just about 'but' requiring negation and 'therefore' often requiring an absence of negation:

*I saw the man, but the woman
I saw the man, therefore the woman
?Worship god, but Allah (fine if it's 'a god', arguable if it's just 'god', for me)
Worship god, therefore Allah
He fell off but was pushed
He fell off therefore was pushed

I'm also not sure the first two pairs a really clearcut examples of NP conjunction anyway. They both (and note the commas) seem like VP conjunction with elided subjects and verbs due to coreference. Note that by changing the subject/verb you can elide one, both, or neither:

- I didn't see the man, but you heard the woman
- I didn't see the man, but heard the woman
- I saw the man, but you the woman [Negationy/switchy stuff going on here again - for some reason the negated "I didn't see the man, but you the woman" is questionable for me (it 'works' if I think about it, but I'd pause if I heard it).
- I didn't see the man, but the woman

There is some difference between 'but' and 'therefore', though: 'therefore' can almost always be augmented into 'and therefore' (as can 'yet'), while 'but' cannot.

On the other hand, 'while' can't be augmented either (you can get "and while", but there the 'and' is genuinely conjoining). And note that "while" can't go in any of these examples, positive or negative, indicating that 'while' and 'therefore' may be different PpoS
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Re: Lexical categories for beginners?

Post by Terra »

However, consider:

I didn't see the man, but the woman. (NP conj NP)
*I didn't see the man, therefore the woman.
Worship no god but Allah.
*Worship no god therefore Allah.
He didn't fall off but was pushed. (VP conj VP)
*He didn't fall off therefore was pushed.
He loves me but not you. (NP conj NP)
?He loves me therefore not you.

I don't think "therefore" is a conjunction at all; as I said earlier, it fits into adverb slots.

"But" originally meant "without, outside", thus "except", so the usages like "Worship no god but Allah" (i.e. "except Allah") are the oldest sense, and are really prepositions. Perhaps the simplest explanation is that over centuries it's been moving from preposition to conjunction, but hasn't entirely arrived.
I don't think that you quite understand.

A word's PoS isn't a combination of all the places it can appear, but each place that it can appear **is a separate PoS**. Thus, asking "What part of speech is 'and'?" (or any word, for that matter) doesn't make sense, because there's no context. As I showed, "and" can sometimes be a nounal-conjunction and sometimes a verbal-conjunction. It's just an accident that many words can be only a single PoS, making the question unambiguous.

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Re: Lexical categories for beginners?

Post by zompist »

Terra wrote:each place that it can appear **is a separate PoS**.
I don't agree. Like any categories, syntactic categories exhibit prototype effects-- thus words can be better or worse examples of a category, or even belong to multiple categories. Besides, the strategy you describe would result in indefinitely multiplying the concept of a syntactic category. With function words, it's very likely you'd end up with a part of speech per word.

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Re: Lexical categories for beginners?

Post by Terra »

Besides, the strategy you describe would result in indefinitely multiplying the concept of a syntactic category. With function words, it's very likely you'd end up with a part of speech per word.
Yes, there would be many categories that would consist of a single word. I'm okay with that and don't see why it should be objectionable. Yes, it would be useful to have a word that denotes a semantic category of
syntactic particles (parts of speech) though.

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Re: Lexical categories for beginners?

Post by Salmoneus »

Or we could just stick with calling parts of speech 'parts of speech'?

[Unless you have a traditional concept of parts of speech, your concept is incoherent anyway - we'd have to define each of all the possible infinite number of contexts a word could appear in (or at least millions and millions of concepts, if you exclude certain recursive and conjunctive constructions wholesale). But by using the concept of parts of speech, we can reduce that infinite (/immense) number of contexts to a practical number.]
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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

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Re: Lexical categories for beginners?

Post by sunandshadow »

I'm doing another university library trip on Sunday, this time I will remedy last time's mistake of not getting any morphology books! Lol. Currently I'm discovering how cognitive grammar takes a philosophically/politically approach from transformational generative grammar, which is sort of relevant to the argument here about whether you can have many parts of speech which have only one word in the category. Completely different from what I imagined a book called Cognitive Grammar was going to be about, heh.

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