SYNTAX
I. syntax - shows whether units belong to the same category or not
Syntactic categories:
II. word-level categories - words belong to such categories as Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Prepositions etc.
Phonological evidence - the stress in such words depends on the category to which they belong
Semantic evidence - the sentences are ambiguous
*But these criteria are unreliable:
A murder – denotes an action but it is a noun
Fast food – ‘fast’ indicates the manner but it is an adjective
Happiness – denotes a state but it is a noun
Morphological evidence
-verbs have 5 forms
-morphological criterion justifies the distinction between verbs and modal verbs
-only adjectives and adverbs have comparative forms (-er, -est)
-only adverbs carry the ending –ly
-only nouns have plural –s
-prepositions are invariable (no inflections)
Syntactic evidence - grammatical rules children learn are category based
I want a car
(a: in this position also the, this etc)
a child can now form sentences with those words
III. phrase-level categories - word-level categories can be expanded into phrasal categories: nouns can form NPs, verbs can form VPs etc.
Morphological evidence - one morpheme in English can go with phrases and not just words
Semantic evidence
Alice could not sign the contract.
-phonology: negative ’not’ can be contracted
-such a contraction is possible only when ‘not’ modifies the modal and not when it modifies the VP
-rule of contraction is sensitive to the structure of the sentence
Adjectival phrase: 2. Adverbial phrase
Syntactic evidence:
Preposing - to place before another constituent in the sentence (only the whole phrase can be proposed)
Sentence fragments - does not necessarily have a main verb in it, but can be understood as a complete unit of meaning (only whole phrases can serve as sentence fragments)
Coordination – combining two sentences with the use of conjunction (only identical constituents can be conjoined)
Pronominalisation - to treat a word as a pronoun (only whole phrases can be replaced with pronouns)
Ellipsis – skipping a piece of information (only verb phrases can be elipted)