Re: THEORY: Parts of speech, was: Syntaxy-Turvy

On Fri, 30 Jun 2000 09:42:08 -0400, Ed Heil <edheil@...> wrote:

>I doubt it is ever completely unrelated, but there certainly can be
>considerable mismatch.  I doubt you'll ever find a natural language which
>doesn't, on the whole, have sentences which are structured around a
central
>verb, explicit or implied, and its one or more attendant nouns, explicit
or
>implied.  (In this sentence I mean 'verb' and 'noun' in their semantically
>defined senses.)
Here I don't understand only the last point: when I think of what
sentences are structured around, I feel that I deal with 'syntactic'
or 'formal' nouns and verbs, which IMO only *tend* to be correlated
with the respective 'lexemic' or 'semantic' classes.

<...>
>I
>usually think of linguistics in terms of people like Ronald Langacker, who
>defines *everything* semantically, and does not believe in autonomous
syntax
>at *all*.
I think I have a difficulty here, too, but a slightly different one.
I would say that I don't really understand what is so specifically
verbal in 'syntactic verbs', or nominal in 'syntactic nouns', *if not*
their typical semantics.

That is, I accept the idea of formal classes, I only can't see clearly
any other reason to call them 'nouns' and 'verbs' except the tendency
for the 'semantic' nouns and verbs to belong to the respective formal
classes for the most part.

Moreover, I can't say why we perceive English subjects as 'subjects',
and English predicates as 'predicates', and not the reverse! - unless
I accept that we term 'subject' the role which is more typical of nouns,
which we call 'nouns' since they are the class where most of the
'semantic nouns' belong, etc. ...

>I'd best keep working on it and see how it works itself out in practice.
Yes, please! I'm really interested to know where you come and why!

>> In other words, an object's instability in
>>the real world correlates with the number of details that must be
>>attributed to it, to obtain a meaningful description, on the level of
>>a sentence (a dynamically generated linguistic entity) rather than
>>simply definition of the term (a relatively fixed linguistic entity).
>
>I'm not sure I agree with you here.  You're saying that the reason
"eating" is
>a verb and "sandwich" is a noun is that "eating" in the real world is more
>unstable than "sandwich" in the real world?
Yes, I perceive things like that. Despite the additional difficulty
that a 'sandwich' is something designed to be 'eaten'.

I'd also say that 'eating' as such is something too abstract to be
mentioned often (otherwise it tends to become 'food', 'meals', etc.,
on the lexemic level). It is 'more obligatory' in the everyday usage
to specify who eats what than to specify for the sandwich who made
it and for whom, and who ate it, or what else could happen to it.

Besides, the link between 'sandwich' and 'eating' is asymmetric: in
'sandwich' it is embedded in the definition (and for those nouns for
which it isn't, the link itself becomes very loosely accidental).

>>But: it seems that you define parts of speech as syntactic classes,
>>which leads to a question more difficult for me: what are 'nouns',
>>'verbs', etc. from a purely syntactic point of view?
>
>I don't think that in Taxy I define parts of speech as syntactic classes.
I
>define them semantically -- nouns are prototypically objects, and verbs
are
>prototypically activities.
Yes, now I see my mistake.

>
>The difference between English and Taxy is that where English takes verbs
>(semantically defined) as the core of a sentence, and surrounds them with
>whatever nouns (semantically defined) they are associated with, Taxy takes
>nouns (semantically defined) as the core of the sentence, and surrounds
them
>with whatever verbs (semantically defined) they are associated with.
Here I can formulate another question: what is so 'specifically verbal'
or 'specifically nominal' with those roles in English? (Cf. above,
about 'subjects' and 'predicates').

Well, I think my question won't help you at all, its' better if you
simply go on building a system inverted with regard to English. Actually,
Taxy may become the best illustration for one possible answer: nothing.


Basilius