A Typology of Word CategoriesNote: Round brackets around an
element means that that element
is optional.It should be pointed out, however, that nouns tend not to have such a strong
relationship to their arguments as verbs do. Often a noun can be used without any
mention of its arguments:
(43) a this is Picasso’s painting of petunias
b this is Picasso’s painting
c this is a painting of petunias
d this is a painting
We might therefore state that the arguments of nouns are optionally represented in an
expression and indicate their optionality in the lexical entry by placing the elements of
the -grid in brackets:
(44) painting -grid: <(agent), (theme)>
To complete the picture, it should also be pointed out that Prepositions too can act
as predicates:
(45) the house is on the hill
In this example, the arguments the house and the hill are related by a relation
expressed by the preposition on. Thus we can propose the following lexical entry for
this preposition:
(46) on -grid: <theme, location>
With reference to the categorial features introduced in the preceding section, note
that it is the [–F] categories that can have -grids. [+F] categories, as we will see
below, are not specified in their lexical entries for these.
3.3 Grammatical aspects of meaning
Consider the following bracketed sentence:
(47) I think [that Mary may marry Martin]
The predicate here is the verb marry and the arguments are Mary and Martin. Let us
call the part of meaning expressed by a predicate and its arguments the basic
proposition. But what role do the other words, may and that, have in the sentence?
Clearly, they have no role in the basic proposition, being neither predicates nor
arguments. But they do carry some meaning. May is a modal auxiliary verb and in
this sentence it either expresses that the event described by the predicate and its
arguments (Mary marrying Martin) is a possibility or that permission has been given
for it to take place:
(48) a Mary may marry Martin – but it’s not sure that she will.
b Mary may marry Martin – his mum will allow it.
The kind of meaning we are talking of here is known as the modality of the sentence
and thus auxiliary verbs like may, can, should, etc. express modality.
That is a complementiser and its meaning is a little more difficult to determine.
We can see its meaning if we compare (47) to (49):