Binding Theory: Combining and Breaking Down Adjective, Adverb, and Determiner Categories, Study notes of Linguistics

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February 5, 2004

Ch 3.7–3.

More on categories

Pseudo-guest lecture: Binding theory

Overview

Conflating categories Decomposing categories (features) Conference talk on binding theory and eye-tracking Midterm 1

Advectives?

Similarities: Semantic

Morphological

Syntactic

Morphological similarities

Counterexamples? Many adverbs are simply adjectives+ly. – Examples? Examples? Counterexamples?of their own, instead use adjective base + er. – Adverbs don’t have a morphological comparative form adverb positions. – Examples? Counterexamples?systematically allow the same form in both adjective and Some adverbs (and more generally) some dialects

Syntactic difference

So what’s the difference between adjectives and adverbs?

Distribution

with a difference in position. That is, the difference in form (when it occurs) correlates This is in fact a case of

(^) complementary distribution

morpheme spelled Similar to case of allomorphs of the English plural

(^) -s .

like coordination or distribution are going to fail. NB: This complementary distribution means that tests

Costs and benefits of advective analysis

Which model is better?

Adjectives and Determiners: Differences

Morphological – Examples? Syntactic – Examples? Semantic – Examples?

Syntactic differences

The big dog slept. Both adjectives and determiners precede nouns. *Big the dog slept. If both are present, the determiner must go first.

Semantic differences

Function: modify. Adjectives describe properties of the nouns they

of the class of things denoted by the noun. Determiners serve to ‘pick out’ particular members

Selectional restrictions: ill-formedness. – Examples? Some adjectives-noun combinations give pragmatic

singular v. plural).look more syntactic or semantic (count v. mass, Some determiner-noun are also ill-formed, but these

Conflating categories – summary

Adjectives and adverbs are similar. Adjectives and determiners are not. into one category. It may be worthwhile to conflate adjectives and adverbs

Features

So far, categories have been

(^) primitives

From now on, take categories to be

(^) bundles of features

generality. This allows us to talk about classes at varying degrees of ... and even cross-cutting classes. Underspecification

: Giving values for only some

features, defining a larger class.

Proposed features

The features in this model are all

(^) binary

: That is, they all

have two possible values:

and

.

Two binary features can distinguish four categories:

+N

N

+V

A

V

V

N

P

Subcategories: Auxiliary verbs

with.classes that are more fine-grained that what we started Going the other way, we can use features to define features:the category verb, but distinguish them with two new Radford proposes to group modals and auxiliaries into

M and

^ AUX

AUX is only appropriate for elements that are already

[+V,

(^)
N].

M is only appropriate for elements that are already

[+AUX].

Three kinds of verbs

[+V,

(^)
N, (^)
AUX]: Non-auxiliary verbs

(^) eat, sleep, ...

[+V,

(^)
N, ^ AUX,

(^)
M]: Non-modal auxiliaries

(^) be, do,

have ... [+V,

(^)
N,+AUX,+M]: Modals

(^) can, will must ...