Re: Which part of speech?

Mass reply. I've started my second flamewar, but now over minimalism
versus...what framework is it again?

Andreas palsalge
>Mightn't it be so simple as them saying "adverb" where they mean
>"adverbial"?
Oh, I feel stupid. 'Adverbial' meaning 'verbal adjunct', not 'adverbial'
meaning 'category with great similarities to adjectives but operating on
adjectives and verbs'. According to my training, that would include adverbs
(or adjectives if you don't have adverbs) and adpositional phrases.


Muke palsalge
>As far as I'm aware, the traditional parts of speech apply to
>individual words, not phrases.  (Necessarily so, as the breakdown
>originally depended on declension as well as syntactic properties.)
There's the notion of headedness in X' syntax and further theories in that
strain. A phrase is headed by a word; the category of the head is the
category of the phrase. I don't know which other frameworks use headedness
or how, but X' up to late Government and Binding are strict structuralist
approaches--you have to specify rules for everything and abide by them
strictly. If you allow nouns as adverbial phrases, then you either have to
specify a subset of nouns throughout the grammar and lexicon or allow any
noun. Excessive subcategorization is not desirable. Of course, you could
allow any noun in an adverbial position and let the semantics sort it out,
making (1) and (2) both grammatical but (2) nonsensical:
(1) I visited Barcelona last year.
(2) #I visited Barcelona rancid beef.

Hm...this looks like evidence toward the adverb / noun bifurcation. But if
it's below phrasal level, chaos ensues. (Eris is victorious.) And if it's at
phrasal level, you're back to the requirements for subdivisions. The
minimalist programme would let you assign a syntactic feature to the
subclass of nouns or directly access the semantic (phi) features--I prefer
the latter solution.

Yes, I'm a Chomskyan. Sorry--should I try LFG?

>And in Latin:
>Gregem legi proxima nocte group.ACC read.1sg.PF nearest.*ABL* night.*ABL*
Ablative's used with prepositions, too. How common is the adverb category,
cross-linguistically?

>It shouldn't have to be a proper noun to account for the lack of a
>determiner. Determiners are eschewable on *uncountable* nouns, whether
>abstract (love was, justice was), mass (wood was, cheese was), or proper
>(John was, Jane was).
Point--I was hasty.

>But in any case, isn't "yesterday" a proper noun anyway, being a name for a
>unique or particular moment in time?
I don't know. What tests can you use to determine that?

-Chris, who really should get back to his big final paper due in two hours

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