Re: Word class marking in the wild...

Lars Mathiesen wrote:
>2008/11/18 Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>:
> > Lars Mathiesen skrev:
> >> This article describes how even English seems to allow heuristic
> >> discrimination of nouns and verbs (with a low success rate, it seems,
> >> but better than random):
> >>
> >> http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/060809_word_sounds.html
> >
> > So what **is** the difference? one wonders! Intonation?
>
>Something about clustering analysis in a multidimensional parameter space
>based on occurrence of phonological features. There's not enough detail in
>the linked article to tell what's really going on. The real reference is:
>
>Farmer, T.A., Christiansen, M.H. & Monaghan, P. (2006). Phonological
>typicality influences on-line sentence comprehension. Proceedings of the
>National Academy of Sciences, 103, 12203-12208.
>
>Available online here <http://www.pnas.org/content/103/32/12203.full>
>(tl;dry).
>
I probably shouldn't say this, but I simply don't understand that article.
How, for example, is "insect" considered "verb-like" vs. "noun-like"
marble?? It escapes me.

I though it might have to do with homonymous noun-verb pairs, as in their
"needs" example. English has quite of few of these: dog (N.), dog (to follow
tenaciously), similiarly "tail", or "kill" (She'll kill the moose ~ It was a
clean kill).  Aside from the frame in which each can occur (usually ART
(ADJ) N  vs. NP V (NP) ) what does the phonology of the words have to do
with anything.  I don't see it.

Then again I though it might have to do with the phenomenon known as
juncture-- the difference between "nitrate" and "night rate", but
no..........

There was also a certain amount of "elaboration of the obvious", as a
professor of mine once described sociology :-))

Reply