Chapter 1 - Grammatical Foundations: Wordssentence starts with a word like obviously or not. It follows, then, that distributional
positions are not defined in terms of linear order. Just how distributional positions are
defined is something to which we will return when we have introduced the relevant
concepts.
A further complication is indicated by the following observation:
(20) a Knut hates sea
b *Knut smiles sea
The morphological forms hates and smiles are both present tense, indicating that the
words are of the same category, i.e. verbs. However, as demonstrated by (20), these
words appear to have different distributions and thus they belong to different
categories. How can this apparent contradiction be reconciled? We will see that part of
the solution to this problem follows from the way in which distributions are defined,
which we have yet to discuss. However, another aspect of distribution can be discussed
at this point. Note that a sentence in which the verb smiles would be grammatical,
would be ungrammatical with the word hates:
(21) a Knut smiles
b *Knut hates
Obviously there are words which cannot go in either of these positions:
(22) a Knut cats sea
b Knut cats
What (22) indicates is that the positions we are considering here are both verb
positions, and hence a noun cannot occupy them. Yet some verbs can occupy one of
these positions and other verbs can occupy the other. This suggests that there are
different types of verb, what we might call subcategories of the category verb. If this
is right, we would expect that the set of possible verbal positions would be divided up
between the different verbal subcategories so that the positions in which one can
appear in are those in which the others cannot. In other words, different subcategories
will have complementary distributions. This indeed seems to be true, as (20) and
(21) indicate.
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: