It is not the actual word that is relevant here. What seem to be relevant are rather properties of words.
The pigs grunt
*The pig grunt
Agreement relation among words gets reflected in morphological forms of words. A morphosyntactic feature is a property of words that the syntax is sensitive to and which may determine the particular shape that a word has. Features seem to be the core elements of languages that relate sound and meaning.
The sheep bleat
The sheep bleats
The plural feature clearly has an effect not just on the morphology of the word, but also on its meaning: in this case it affects whether we are talking about one child or more than one; one man or more than one, and so on. Features that have an effect on semantic interpretation in this way are called Interpretable features. We shall see that the notion of Interpretable features, and its opposite, Uninterpretable features, will play a significant role when we come to build up our theory of syntax.
In an intuitive sense, the features responsible for the morphological difference are also responsible for a semantic difference. Usually a plural noun is associated semantically with a group of entities in the world, rather than with a single entity. However, once again the link between syntax and semantics is not strict: the word scissors is plural in form, but refers to an entity which is usually conceived of as a single thing.
The most important set of features that is relevant to syntax is the set of Category features.These are the features that are responsible for separating words into the traditional word classes of noun, verb, adjective, preposition, plus a few others. These features certainly seem to have some semantic basis: nouns, by and large, tend to pick out objects in the world, while verbs tend to pick out events, or actions. Of course, as is well known, this semantic criterion is by no means foolproof. A noun like race, for example, seems to pick out something that is clearly an event, and it’s difficult to think of a verb like exist as denoting an event or action.
If we want to make the generalisation that whole classes of words (nouns vs. verbs) are restricted as to the features that may occur on them ([past] cannot occur on nouns). Moreover, at least some of the words in these classes show distinctive morphological endings that reflect the class they are in. Finally, the two classes broadly seem to have different interpretations. These considerations would be enough evidence to allow our language learner to posit that there are features in English that distinguish these classes. We therefore posit the feature [N] which is part of the featural specification of nouns and [V] which serves in the same capacity for verbs. A plural noun like men will then have the partial feature specification in:
men [N, plural]
In summary, then, we have four major word classes, which we usually abbreviate as just N, V, A and P and which we could distinguish using the four features [N], [V], [A] and [P]. Another term for these features is major category features. We can refer to [N] as the Nfeature of a word and [V] as the V-feature and so on. Note that since we have four categories, it is once again possible to define these by using two features. Here is one possibility:
a. noun [N]
b. verb [V]
c. adjective [N, V]
d. preposition [ ]
This feature system also has the curious result that prepositions do not have category features. This is almost certainly not correct. An alternative, here, would be to adopt the binary system, giving the following feature specifications:
a. noun [+N, –V]
b. verb [–N, +V]
c. adjective [+N, +V]
d. preposition [–N, –V]
So, we have met morphological features and major category features. There are also semanticfeatures. In addition, words have a pronunciation, which, if we are to be consistent, must be specified featurally as well. The features responsible for a word's pronunciation are termed phonological features, so a lexical item turns out to be a collection of phonological features, semantic features and morphosyntactic features. It also appears to be the case that phonological features are universal in the sense of their being a universal set, some portion of which is selected in particular languages. Each language, then, specifies what its lexicon (i.e. its set of lexical items) is, constructing its lexical items from putatively universal featural domains. The child learning a language is faced with the task of internalising this lexicon on the basis of the evidence that he/she hears and sees.
In general, then, we assume that syntactic relations like agreement access syntactic features, and not phonological or purely semantic features. Some syntactic features have a transparent effect on interpretation (so, by and large, nouns with a [plural] feature in English are interpreted as referring to more than one entity), but some do not. This idea, that syntactic relations hold between purely syntactic features is known as the Autonomy of Syntax Hypothesis.
The morphosyntactic feature does not always have a predictable semantic interpretation, something which reinforces the idea that the semantic interpretation of a feature is not accessible to syntactic processes. These types of features, person, number and gender, go under the general name of Phifeatures (often written f-features). F-features appear to be interpretable, and are motivated by both semantic and morphological facts. The agreement relation we saw above ensures that some subset of the f-features on subjects, agrees with those on verbs.
No comments:
Post a Comment