6. Category in Morphology
A different type of justification for positing that sentences are hierarchically struc-
tured
into constituents assigned to various categories: categories have independent
morphological motivation.
(1) In English, verbs take a range of inflections including –ing, -s, -ed:
like - liking - likes – liked
kiss – kissing – kisses – kissed
Prepositions don’t permit the same range of verbal inflections:
at - *atting - *ats - *atted
(2) Adjectives have a comparative form –er: tall – taller, fat – fatter, lovely – lovelier
Nouns don’t permit the same range of comparative inflection:
boy - *boyer, girl - *girler, cat -*catter
Only nouns have a plural inflection: They are fools. They are *foolishes
(3) Only Noun Phrases can take a possessive -‘s inflection:
John’s, the king’s, that poor man’s, etc.
But Adverbial Phrases don’t permit the same range of possessive inflections:
*very slowly’s, *rather too quickly’s, *much too soon’s
=> Thus, we need to posit categories not only to account for syntactic
facts, but
equally to account for morphological facts as well.
In other words, categorical constituents have an effect on the charac-
teristic
range of morphological facts including various inflections.
7. Category in Phonology
Formulating a phonological rule for English provides a principled account of
word-stress in cases such as the following:
In each of the (a) sentences, the stress falls on the second syllable (italicized) of the
relevant word; whereas in each of the (b) sentences, the stress falls on the first syllable.
The highlighted words in (a) show the categorial status of a Verb, but those in (b) show
the categorical status of a Noun. Phonological rules have access to categorial information.
8. Syntactic Property : Further syntactic phenomenon which lends support to the
postulation of constituents and categories:
(1) coordination, (2) intrusion, (3) anaphora, (4) omissibility
(1) Coordination: Many languages have a variety of coordinating conjunctions(CONJ)
which can be used to conjoin words or phrases:
(75) *John rang up his mother and up his sister.
A constraint for the phenomenon above may be needed as this:
only constituents can be conjoined; nonconstituent sequences cannot be con-
joined.
(77) shows that we can conjoin two PPs or two NPs freely, but that any attempt
to conjoin an NP with a PP, or a PP with an NP leads to an unnatural sentence.
So the constraint might be revised as (78).
So the following sentences are acceptable because the conjoined pairs of elements
belong to the same category: identical lexical category vs. identical phrasal category.
(a) Good linguists and philosophers are rare. (N and N)
(b) John is a very kind and considerate person. (A and A)
(c) He went to London and to Paris. (PP and PP)
(d) He may go to London and visit his mother. (VP and VP)
(2) Intrusion: Some elements cannot be freely inserted anywhere in a sentence.
An Adverbial Phrase like almost certainly can intrude between certain se-
quences
of words, but not between others.
For example, a sentence ‘The cat will eat his dinner’ has the constituent struc-
ture:
We can postulate the following condition on the distribution of parenthetical
adverbial expressions like almost certainly:
(84) Parenthetical adverbial expressions like almost certainly can be
inserted only immediately under an S, not a VP, or NP, or PP, etc.
(85) for (81a) would violate the condition (84): almost certainly is inserted in the con-
stituent NP.
(86) for (81c) satisfies the condition (84): almost certainly is not inserted in any con-
stituent,
positioned immediately under S.
