1.2.2 Categories

The obvious question to ask is: on what basis are words categorised? As pointed out above, it is not straightforward to categorise words in terms of their meaning, though traditionally this is a very popular idea. Part of the problem is that when one looks at the range of meanings associated with the words of one category, we need to resort to some very general concept that they might share. For example, a well known definition for the category noun is that these are words that name people, places or things. While this may give us a useful rule of thumb to identifying the category of a lot of words, we often run into trouble as the notion is not particularly precise: in what way do nouns ‘name’ and what counts as a thing, for example? While it may be obvious that the word Bartók names a particular person, because that is what we call the thing that this word refers to, it is not clear why, therefore, the word think is not considered a name, because that is what we call the thing that this refers to. Moreover, the fact that the words:

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:

1.3.4.2 Nouns

4.1 Why the Noun is not the Head of the DP