30
votes
Accepted
What is the idea behind calling the adverb the garbage can of words?
Traditional grammarians going all the way back to Donatus are accused of classifying as adverb any word they couldn't make fit anywhere else in the canonical parts of speech.
It's a very old ...
- 1,490
26
votes
What is the proper definition of a verb?
It's important to draw a distinction between syntax and semantics.
In syntax (how words fit together), words are put into "categories" based on the way they fit together with others. If I ...
- 63.8k
17
votes
Accepted
Is a language possible without verbs or without nouns?
It is not possible for there to be a human language that does not have a way of referring to entities, or to predicate states and actions of an entity. If that is what you mean by "noun" and "verb", ...
- 81.9k
12
votes
Are words classified (PoS) according to their use in a sentence, or does classification precede usage?
Short, snappy answer: parts of speech are a lie perpetuated by Big Syntax.
Longer, actually useful answer: parts of speech are an abstraction created by linguists to explain how syntax works. There's ...
- 63.8k
10
votes
Accepted
What are "Auxilliary nouns" in Kyrgyz?
As far as I'm aware, "auxiliary noun" is essentially a synonym for "relational noun" (see Wikipedia). These are basically nouns that can be used to fulfil the role of adpositions, ...
- 1,087
8
votes
Accepted
Do all languages have the same set of grammatical relations?
I assume, based on the your posts elsewhere, that by 'sentence parts', you are referring to grammatical relations (GRs) like subject, object, etc. In the future, it would be clearer for you to call ...
- 3,431
7
votes
Accepted
Given all the languages that have ever existed, is there a limit for different parts of speech?
First of all, part-of-speech is not an observable. It is a latent category inferred from the utterances we can analyse.
As a latent category, it is dependent on our analysis. There are lots of ...
- 29.8k
7
votes
Accepted
Why words in many romance languages don't have more than one part of speech, unlike words in English
As you are looking for a term, it is zero derivation. English has zero derivation turning a verb into a noun and vice versa. Note that 'record and re'cord aren't an example for zero derivation, in the ...
- 29.8k
7
votes
What is the proper definition of a verb?
Semantically, there are two main functions in language: reference and predication. Some morphological items or words primarily refer to entities in the perceived world, while other items relate the ...
- 540
6
votes
Are modal verbs lexical or grammatical categories?
I think I must be interpreting the question differently from Greg Lee, because my answer is that (at least in English) they must be a grammatical category, because they are different in syntax from ...
- 7,424
6
votes
Accepted
What is the relation between a specifier and a determiner?
Determiner is a grammatical category for words like "the" and "a." Some theories claim that possessive 's is also a determiner.
Specifier is a grammatical relation in certain theories, such as X-bar ...
- 2,364
5
votes
Accepted
Parts-of-speech tagging and finding relevant phrases in documents
[ If I understand, you ideally want all meaningful phrases even where the head is not a noun, eg "save the day", "ready for action", "fantastically" or "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious". ]
You ...
- 7,531
5
votes
Can “to” ever be a Prep or a Particle before “be”
"Can where he went to be revealed?"
from:
Q (where he went to can be revealed)
Q (someone can reveal Q (he went to where))
Schematically, we start with
... can reveal ... [PP to where]
which ...
- 12.4k
5
votes
Infinitive verbs in syntax tree
This answer is based on chapter 2 (section 8: "Infinitival to) of Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the structure of English by Andrew Radford (2004), and "Auxiliaries: To's company" (2012) by Robert ...
- 194
5
votes
What does every verb have in common?
From a linguistic perspective, there is nothing semantic or functional that distinguishes verbs from other word classes. For example, "tall" is an adjective in English, but in many languages it is a ...
- 81.9k
5
votes
Accepted
What is it called when words like "what" and "how", aren't acting interrogatively, and aren't relative-pronouns?
What a good question! [sorry, couldn't resist that].
Now seriously, as you said you don't know, neither did I.
So I got to do a quick search on my favorite site [wiktionary] for this kind of ...
- 412
5
votes
Stolen, part of speech
As Greg Lee indicates, participles are commonly considered to remain verbs, despite being used "like adjectives" in many cases.
However, the situation is a bit confusing because, as far as I know, ...
- 17.8k
5
votes
Accepted
Infinitive Marker
It turns out, "parts of speech" are one of those formalisms that's taught in all the schools, but isn't always useful when you start looking closer.
Fundamentally, "part of speech" is a word's role ...
- 63.8k
5
votes
What is the proper definition of a verb?
What's a verb? It's different in every language. In English, I can see how you don't want to put is and leaves in the same category. And you're right about why is is considered a verb. But it's not ...
- 10k
5
votes
How can I tell the difference between types of assimilation?
This is less of an absolute classification, and more just a description of what's happening in a particular circumstance in a particular language.
Assimilation means one thing is becoming more like ...
- 63.8k
4
votes
Accepted
Can training a Part-of-Speech tagger and parser at the same time improve parsing results?
I think you are talking about joint POS tagging and parsing. If you do not limit yourself to the neural network framework. The following paper can help:
graph-based parser:
Joint models for Chinese ...
- 101
4
votes
What part of speech is "as their native"?
The number of people who speak English as their native language will decline.
The string as their native comprises three separate items: the preposition "as", the genitive pronoun "their" and the ...
- 41
4
votes
Part of Speech in English
I'm assuming you're talking about derivational morphology: adding prefixes and suffixes to words to change their part of speech.
The answer is: because it gives you more words! Take the word "...
- 63.8k
4
votes
What does every verb have in common?
Nothing.
The premise of the question seems to be that the part of speech of a word is somehow deducible from observable facts. This general empiricist view was probably prevalent in American "...
- 12.4k
4
votes
What does every verb have in common?
Prof. Lee and user6726 have given excellent answers above. Though I think the OP's use of semantic criterion isn't completely wrong: The problem is, as Prof. Lee has pointed out above, that he assumes ...
- 3,431
4
votes
Accepted
What's the name of the elements used to extend otherwise basic clauses?
As you correctly figured out, at nightand for his girlfriend start with a preposition followed by a noun phrase. This is called a prepositional phrase (= PP): The head (= the element which determines ...
- 6,478
4
votes
What part of speech is the word "that" in "That you be happy!"
Your phrase is a fragment (not a sentence). It might occur as the answer to a question ("What do you want?"). 'That' is a complementizer -- it makes 'you be happy' the complement of 'what'. This is ...
- 656
4
votes
Accepted
Why not use a Lookup taggers?
Simply put, they're just not as good. Lookup taggers can't deal with the fact that words can have multiple parts of speech: look at "project" in English, which can be a verb or a noun. A lookup tagger ...
- 63.8k
4
votes
Accepted
What are uses of Dependency Parsing in NLP / Computational Linguistics?
Parsing is mostly an important building block used for improving the performance of downstream tasks, not as an application per se.
So, for example, if we are training NER, it helps to hint to the ...
- 7,531
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible