Chapter 1 - Grammatical Foundations: Words(13) idea ideas
cat cats
man men
sheep sheep
hippopotamus hippopotami
The first two cases in (13) represent the regular plural form in English, as we have
been discussing. But even here there are differences. In the first case the morpheme is
pronounced [z] whereas in the second it is pronounced [s]. This is a fact about English
morpho-phonemics, that certain morphemes are unvoiced following an unvoiced
consonant, that we will not go into in this book. However, this does show that what we
are dealing with is something more abstract than simply pronunciations. This point is
made even more forcefully by the third and fourth cases. The plural form men differs
from the singular man in terms of the quality of the vowel and the plural form sheep is
phonetically identical to the singular form sheep. From our point of view, however, the
important point is not the question of how morphological forms are realised (that is a
matter for phonologists), but that the morphological forms exist. Sheep IS the plural
form of sheep and so there is a morphological plural for this word, which we know
therefore is a noun. There is no plural form for the word warm, even abstractly, and so
we know that this is not a noun.
What about cases like weather, where the form weathers can either be taken to be a
plural form or a present tense form, as demonstrated by the following:
(14) a the weathers in Europe and Australasia differ greatly
b heavy rain weathers concrete
This is not an unusual situation and neither is it particularly problematic. Clearly, the
word weather can function as either a noun or a verb. As a noun it can take the plural
morpheme and as a verb it can take the present tense morpheme. There may be issues
here to do with how we handle this situation: are there two entries in the lexicon for
these cases, one for the noun weather and one for the verb, or is there one entry which
can be categorised as either a noun or a verb? Again, however, we will not concern
ourselves with these issues as they have little bearing on syntactic issues.
2.4 Distribution
Let us turn now to the observations made in (2) and (3). There we observed that there
are certain positions in a sentence that some words can occupy and other words cannot.
Clearly, this is determined by category. This is perhaps the most basic point of word
categories as far as syntax is concerned. The grammar of a language determines how
we construct the expressions of the language. The grammar, however, does not refer to
the individual words of the lexicon, telling us, for example, that the word cat goes in
position X in expression Y. Such a system would not be able to produce an indefinite
number of sentences as there would have to be such a rule for every expression of the
language. Instead, the grammar defines the set of possible positions for word
categories, hence allowing the construction of numerous expressions from a small
number of grammatical principles. The question of how these positions are defined is
mostly what this book is about, but for now, for illustrative purposes only, let us
pretend that English has a rule that says that a sentence can be formed by putting a