1Week 2b. Categories and featuresCAS LX 522Syntax IWhere we were…n Lexical categories:n N: noun A: adjective Adv: adverbn V: verb P: prepositionn Functional categories:n I: inflection/aux/modal D: determinern C: complementizer PRN: PronounNot all nouns are the samen We’re trying to describe syntacticbehavior of words, and we tried to putwords into categories based on differencesand similarities in behavior (distribution).n But we already know that there aredifferences even between members of thesame category, for example count vs. massnouns.Count and Massn We could just say, fine, we have twocategories: Count, and Mass.n [Mass furniture], [Mass freedom]n [Count chair], [Count pinnacle]n But then we miss the fact, essentially, thatthey’re all nouns. E.g., what do adjectivesmodify?n Comfortable furniture makes me happy.n Comfortable chairs make me happy.Commonalities and differencesn Basically, mass nouns have something incommon with count nouns (namely,they’re nouns), while also havingdifferences (count nouns are countable,mass nouns are not).n Nouns have the property of being a noun.n Count nouns have the property of beingcountable, mass nouns do not.Featuresn A “feature” is a fancy name for “property”, andis used to express these similarities anddifferences. Features are generally binary [+F] or[-F].n Count nouns have the feature [+count].n Mass nouns have the feature [-count].n Both have the feature [+N].n So things that are true of nouns we can say aretrue of words with the feature [+N]. Things thatare true of count nouns are true of things that are[+N, +count].2Proper and common nounsn We can similarly distinguish proper nouns(names) from common nouns (types).n Boston, Chomsky, Septembern park, linguist, monthn Proper nouns don’t occur with determiners (or ifthey do, they are interpreted as if they werecommon nouns: I met every Chomsky at the picnic,I go to classes every September, the Boston Iremember was cleaner than this.[±Common]n So, Boston is a [+N, -Common] and park isa [+N, +Common]. But they are both [+N].n These “secondary” features definesubclasses of categories, and aresometimes referred to as subcategorialfeatures.Feature matricesn We can in fact encode many of the grammaticalproperties words can have as features, whichwill be useful in formulating our theory. Thefeatures will be anything that our grammaticalrules/generalizations can “refer to”.n The dog [+N, +Count, -Plural] is hot.n The dogs [+N, +Count, +Plural] are hot.n The soup [+N, -Count, -Plural] is hot.n The scissors [+N, -Count, +Plural] are hot.Feature matricesn The dog [+N, +Count, -Plural] is hot.n The dogs [+N, +Count, +Plural] are hot.n The soup [+N, -Count, -Plural] is hot.n The scissors [+N, -Count, +Plural] are hot.n The auxiliary be shows plural agreement: it is arewhen the subject is [+Plural] and is when thesubject is [-Plural]. It doesn’t refer to (care about)[±Count].Adjectives and adverbsn Adjectives and adverbs are a lot alike. Mostadjectives have an adverb form, and can innonstandard speech in fact be used as adverbs.They both can be modified by very.n Suggests that maybe this is more like thedifference between mass and count nouns thanlike the difference between nouns andverbs—perhaps [±ADV] is a subcategorial feature.n quick: [+A, -ADV] quickly: [+A, +ADV]Verbal featuresn Like for nouns, we can think of the different formsthat verbs take as being differentiated by features:n (Note: I’m diverging a bit from Radford here, but I’m right.)n He has shown improvement [+V, +Participle, -Past, +Perfect]n He had shown improvement [+V, +Participle, +Past, +Perfect]n He is showing improvement [+V, +Participle, -Past, -Perfect]n He showed improvement [+V, -Participle, +Past]n He shows improvement [+V, -Participle, -Past, +3sg]n You show improvement [+V, -Participle, -Past, -3sg]n So, -s is usually [-Participle, -Past, +3sg], -en is[+Participle, +Perfect], -ed is [+Past], -ing is[+Participle, -Perfect].3Crosscategorial featuresn Consider what un can attach to.n untie, unfold, unwrap, unpackn unhappy, unfriendly, undeadn *uncity, *uncola, *unconventionn *unupon, *unalongside, *unatn Basically, it applies to reversible verbs andadjectives, but not to nouns orprepositions. How can we state that?Crosscategorial featuresn Suppose that nouns and verbs are the most basiccategories. A noun is a noun and not a verb, andverb is a verb and not a noun.n Noun: [+N, -V].n Verb: [-N, +V].n A conceptual reason to separate nouns andverbs is that verbs are basically predicates—theyattribute some property to the noun. Nouns arebasically arguments, to be assigned properties byverbs.Crosscategorial featuresn Looked at this way, adjectives are kind of“verby” in that they are also attributingproperties.n It’s hard to make that really precise, butwe have a more concrete syntacticsimilarity between verbs and adjectivestoo: both can take un-, while nouns andprepositions cannot.Supercategoriesn Chomsky (1970) proposed that we explainthis by supposing that [±N] and [±V] arethe two basic features that determine thefour lexical categories (N, V, A, P).n N: [+N, -V] V: [-N, +V]n P: [-N, -V] A: [+N, +V]n Given that, what does un attach to?Russian Casen Other languages can give us evidence of this aswell. For example, Russian nouns (all nouns) aremarked for Case (like English pronouns are: mevs. I), but when they are modified by anadjective, the adjective is also marked for case.n What gets marked for Case in Russian?‘The beautiful girl put the black cat in the empty box’boxemptyincatblackputgirlbeautifulkorobkupustuyuvkoshkuchornuyuvsunuladyevushkaKrasivayaFunctional and lexicaln That takes care of N, V, A, P, but what about ourfunctional categories?n In fact, the functional categories (C, I, D, PRN)each seem a little like a lexical category.n Auxiliaries seem a lot like verbs (have, be, do), andinflect like verbs do.n Complementizers and infinitival to seem a bit likeprepositions (e.g., for, to).n Pronouns are kind of nouny.n Determiners are a bit adjectivey.4[+F]?n Perhaps we can add a third binary feature,[±F] to capture this:PN[-V]VA[+V][-N][+N][-F]C, IPRN[-V]AuxD[+V][-N][+N][+F]Grammatical categoryn So what, then is a grammatical category?n A grammatical category is a set of elementswhich have the same value(s) for a given set ofgrammatical features.n Category labels like “N”, or “Aux” are really justshorthand for feature matrices like [+N, -V, -F],or [-N, +V,