1.3 A Typology of Word Categories
Having introduced some of the basic concepts, let us now turn to look at what categories we need to refer to in the description of a language like English. In generative linguistics it is often seen as a positive aim to keep basic theoretical equipment to a bare minimum and not to expand these unnecessarily. This can be seen in the standard approach to word categories in terms of the attempt to keep these to as small a number as possible. In the present book we will mainly be concerned with eight basic categories. These come in two general types: thematic categories and functional categories. In the thematic categories we have verbs (V), nouns (N), adjectives (A) and prepositions (P) and in the functional categories there are inflections (I), determiners (D), degree adverbs (Deg) and complementisers (C). Thus we have the following classification system:
| (23) |
We will introduce these categories individually in the following sections.
1.3.1 Categorial features
1.3.2 Predicates and arguments
1.3.3 Grammatical aspects of meaning
1.3.4 The Thematic categories
1.3.4.1 Verbs
1.3.4.2 Nouns
1.3.4.3 Adjectives
1.3.4.4 Prepositions
1.3.5 Functional Categories
1.3.5.1 Inflections
1.3.5.2 Determiners
1.3.5.3 Degree Adverbs
1.3.5.4 Complementisers
1.3.6 Functionally underspecified categories