Linguistics An Introduction

A natural first step in a scientific approach to words is to seek to establish the different types of words which appear in languages. It's easy to see that native speakers can divide words into different types (even if they can't actually tell you how they do this), and, moreover, we can see that speakers can use their knowledge of what the different word types are when they are confronted with a completely new word. Suppose, for instance, that you hear the sentence in (87):

1. (87) A plingle has arrived

Of course, you don't know what plingle means, but you can immediately infer that plingle is the sort of expression which occurs in the constructions the plingle, two plingles, every plingle which has ever existed, etc. In short, (87) enables you to assign plingle to a particular class of words, and once you know what class of words it belongs to, you know a great deal about its potential for occurrence within the language. It is reasonable, then, to suppose that the word class to which a word belongs is specified in that word's lexical entry. The immediate task facing us in this section is that of developing criteria for assigning words to classes.

Lexical categories

A familiar distinction is that between nouns (N) and verbs (V), and there are several ways in which we can justify this for English.