Prototypical and non-prototypical grammatical categories

SEMINAR 4

PROTOTYPES IN GRAMMAR

OUTLINE

Part 1

The language-particular level and the general level.

Grammaticalisation.

Prototypical and non-prototypical grammatical categories.

Part 2

Study questions

Part 3

Sentence Parsing

Key notions: phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, semantics, grammatical meaning, grammatical category, grammatical form, language particular level, general level, grammaticalisation, prototype, prototypical grammatical category

Recommended reading

1. Huddleston, R. English Grammar: An Outline. – Cambridge: CUP, 1988

2. Langacker, R.W. Language and Its Structure. – NY: CUP, 1986

Projects

Grammar of advertisements.

Grammar of songs.

Grammar of chats.

Gender-related grammar.

1. The language-particular level and the general level.

The description of a language usually comprises three major components: phonology, grammar and lexicon. Phonology describes the sound system: consonants, vowels, stress, intonation, and so on. The two most basic units of grammar are the word and the sentence.

One subcomponent of grammar, called morphology, deals with the form of words, while the other, called syntax, deals with the way words combine to form sentences.

Lexicon, or dictionary, lists the vocabulary items, mainly words and idioms (such as a couch potato, give up, and so on), specifying how they are pronounced, how they be­have grammatically, and what they mean.

It is important that we distinguish between the study of linguistic form and the study of meaning as all three of the major components are concerned with aspects of both. The special term semantics is applied to the study of meaning, and linguists accordingly distinguish phonological semantics (covering such matters as the meanings expressed by stress and intonation), grammatical seman­tics (dealing with the meanings associated with grammatical categories such as past tense, interrogative clause, and so on) and lexical semantics (the meanings of vocabulary items).

The relation between form and meaning in grammar is by no means straight­forward. This is why it is necessary to explain the model or framework of grammati­cal description and the methodological approach adopted. It is advisable that we should begin with the question of how to define the various grammatical categories - categories such as noun, subject, clause, tense, and so on (there will inevit­ably be a considerable number of them).

In this respect it is important to distinguish two levels at which our grammatical categories need to be defined:

the language-particular level and the general level.

At the language-particular level we are concerned with the properties that characterise the cate­gory in the particular language under consideration, in our case it is English. At this level we investigate, for example, how nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., behave differently in English sentence structure, how English distinguishes between the subject and object of a verb, and so on.

At the general level, by con­trast, the researchers’ concern is with the properties that are common across different languages to categories such as noun, verb, adjective, subject, object.

To make the distinction more concrete, let’s consider the part-of-speech analysis of the underlined words in the following sentences:

The boss had watched the secretary destroy the files.

The boss had witnessed the destruction of the files.

At the language-particular level we have the criteria that lead us to put such words as boss, secretary, etc. into one part-of-speech, and the words as had, watched, etc. into a second. At the general level we use the criteria that lead us to call the first class 'noun' and the second 'verb'. We do not devise a fresh set of terms for each new language we describe but draw, rather, on a large repertoire of general terms.

It is important to realize that definitions at the general level provide a principled basis for applying these terms to the various categories that need to be differentiated in the grammatical description of par­ticular languages.

To clarify the point let’s have a closer look at these very sentences. According to the standard traditional definition (unfortunately quite often used in normative school grammars) of a noun as ‘the name of a person, place or thing’ can be hardly considered accurate as it will automatically exclude the noun ‘destruction’ because it obviously does not denote a concrete object. Nevertheless, it is included into the noun class by all grammarians due to the fact that it enters the structure of the sentence the way the other nouns do, that is in accordance with its grammatical ‘behaviour’ that is distinctly different from that of ‘destroy’.

As for the verb destroy it takes an expression like the files as its complement’.

Nouns do not take complements of this kind. To get a complement we have to use a different structure – more likely the structure with of (destruction of …).

Besides the noun destruction, like other nouns, enters into constructions with the definite article, which is not possible with the verb destroy. It is these properties as well as the possibility to use modifiers with nouns (the surreptitious destruction of the files) that help distinguish between nouns and verbs at the language-particular level. At the general level the definition should be reformulated to avoid misunderstanding. Thus saying that ‘noun’ is the part of speech that contains among its most elementary members those words that denote persons, places or concrete objects we do not exclude the noun’ destruction’ because it has the same grammatical properties as other nouns.

Grammaticalisation.

Linguists recognise a grammatical category in analysing a given language only if it is grammatically distinguishable from other categories in the language. To take a very obvious example, we will not recognise 'pointed noun' as a subclass of nouns containing words like pin or spire which denote pointed objects, because there is nothing grammatically special about such words: they are not grammatically distinguishable from words like circle or bed.

A satisfactory definition or explication of a grammatical category must thus surely make reference to the kind of properties that justify its inclusion in the analysis, properties based on its distinctive grammatical behaviour. This means that the definition of the grammatical category is different from a notional definition completely, as notional definitions are based mostly on the semantic properties of the linguistic expressions, e.i. on their meaning rather than on their grammatical form.

Objections to notional definitions apply, however, only at the language-particular

level. At the general level we are concerned with naming and identifying across languages categories that have already been established by language-particular criteria, and here it is perfectly legitimate to make use of notional definitions. This is not to say that general definitions will be based ex­clusively on meaning, but normally they will be expected to include some refer­ence to meaning.

Although we do not find a one-to-one relation between categories of grammatical form and categories of meaning, we do not expect to find grammatical categories that have no connection at all with semantic categor­ies. Rather they will have their basis in semantics, and a general definition will need to indicate what is the semantic basis for a given category.

Some general categories are universal: all languages, for example, distinguish between nouns and verbs. Many, however, belong in only a subset of languages.

All languages enable their speakers to ask questions where the set of answers is respectively closed and open:

for Are you tired? the answers are Yes and No,

whereas

Where are they going? has an indefinite number of possible answers: To Canberra, To New York, and so on.

But not all the languages have different patterns for such sentences.

The distinction between statements and closed questions is grammaticalised in English bythe different positions of the subject,but there are languages where it is expressed by a difference in intonation rather than by a difference in grammatical construction, and this type of language therefore has no grammatical category of closed interrogative clause. Similarly there are languages which have no grammatical distinction (as opposed to an intonational one) corresponding to that found in English between the open interrogative Where are they going? and the declarative They are going somewhere, and here the grammatical category of open interrogative clause will likewise not be applicable.

It is for this reason that our general definitions incor­porate a condition of grammaticalisation. Thus this definition will be satisfied only in languages where the semantic category is grammaticalised - grammatica­lised more specifically in the structure of the clause.

As a second example, consider the category 'imperative clause'. Imperative contrasts with 'declarative' and 'interrogative', as illustrated in the following sentences:

Be generous! Imperative

You are generous Declarative

Are you generous? Interrogative

An imperative clause is commonly defined as one that is used to issue a command or request. But it is easy to see from the following examples that this will not work as a language-particular definition.

Have a good holiday Imperative

Passengers are requested to remain seated Declarative

Would you mind speaking a little more slowly? Interrogative

as all these are imperative with different degree of intensity.

Again, then, we will need to reformulate the traditional definition so as to make clear that it is to be interpreted at the general level: the term 'imperative clause' will be applied to a grammatically distinguishable class of clauses whose members are characteristically used as commands/requests. The fact that these examples are analysed as imperative clauses is now no longer a problem: they are assigned to the same clause class because they are like Be generous! not so much in re­spect of their grammatical form, but because they would most naturally be used as commands or requests. Although we do not find a one-to-one relation between categories of grammatical form and categories of meaning we do not expect to find the grammatical categories that have no connection with semantic categories. Rather they have their basis in semantics.

Thus the semantic distinction between statements, questions and requests/commands leads to the grammatical distinction between declarative, interrogative and imperative sentences. These arise through grammaticalisation, i.e. the process of grammatical differentiation on the basis of semantic differences.

Prototypical and non-prototypical grammatical categories.

Another important distinction that must be made is betweenprototypical andnon-prototypical examples of a grammatical category. We very often find for a given category a central core of examples sharing a number of grammatical properties, with other examples exhibiting some but not all of these properties: the core of examples having the full set of properties will be then regarded as the prototypical examples. For example, secretary, friend and idea are prototypical nouns, whereas perseverance and wetness are not: they differ from the prototype in not entering into contrasts of 'number', that is singular vs plural.

Thus secretary contrasts secre­taries but there is no plural for perseverance. Perseverance and wetness certainly have enough properties in common with secretary, friend, idea to justify their as­signment to the same part of speech, but the lack of number contrast makes them non-prototypical.

A good deal further removed from the prototype is an example like umbrage "offence": this is now restricted to the idioms take umbrage and give umbrage, so that it is unable to enter into many of the grammatical relations that are characteristic of prototypical nouns. Not only is thereno contrasting form *umbrages, but we cannot have *this umbrage, *my umbrage, *the umbrage that had impressed us so much, and so on. (The asterisk indicates that what follows is ungrammatical, at least in the interpretation under con­sideration.)

An example of a non-prototypical verb might be beware, as in Beware of the new boss. It is very different from a prototypical verb inasmuch as it does not enter into contrast with past and present tense forms - we do not have *He bewares/bewared of the new boss; there is nevertheless no doubt that it belongs to the part of speech 'verb' rather than to any of the others.

What such examples show is that grammatical likeness is often not an all-or-nothing matter but a matter of degree, and that we cannot expect to be always able to give a language-particular definition of a category in the form of a set of sufficient and necessary conditions for inclusion in the category - i.e. a set of properties such that an item will be included if and only if it has all the properties in the set. Instead we will often begin with definitions of the prototype and con­sider then how far beyond the prototype the category should be allowed to extend - and there may be a certain amount of indeterminacy or arbitrariness over precisely where the boundary should be drawn.

Study questions

1. Think of the examples of your own to explain the difference between the definitions of grammatical categories at the language-particular and the general levels.

2. Analyze the case system in English and in Ukrainian in terms of grammaticalisation.

3. Exemplify prototypes of English and Ukrainian

3.1 nouns;

3.2 tense forms;

3.3 adverbs.

Part 3

Sentence parsing