Functional class (so called “part of speech”) assignment as a kind of meaning-bound word syntactic information

Abstrakt

Functional class (so called “part of speech”) assignment as a kind of meaning-bound word syntactic information

The traditional division of the lexicon into parts of speech which seems to satisfy the requirements of a syntactic description, on the one hand, and a word formation description, on the other hand, cannot be looked upon as a result of a strict classification covering the totality of the lexicon and being based on a coherent set of criteria. Making the criteria more precise or correcting them is an issue of extreme importance and urgency in the work on the theory of language. Such achievements can help solve many other problems, in particular, syntactic ones. The article presents a scheme of several preliminary steps of an amelioration program (a scheme which has been improved compared to the author’s earlier attempts going in the same direction). The program is based on combinability characteristics of words, i.e. on those properties that are responsible for the tasks to be accomplished by a given class of expressions in making up a higher order unit, i.e. a syntagm (the author emphasizes this point: it is syntagm rather than sentence which is the category the recommended approach is focusing on), and that, importantly, determine the limits of syntactic rules, i.e. the ins and outs of the rules (the limits concerning the overall stock of words).