A Typology of Word Categories(164) a he’s not the him she married
b I met a him the other day
Like the inflections, the lexical properties of determiners are relatively simple.
They have no theta grid and they subcategorise only for nominal complements. If
pronouns are determiners, then in their pronominal use they can be considered as
‘intransitive’, taking no complement:
(165) the category: [+F, +N, –V]
subcat: [nominal]
a category: [+F, +N, –V]
subcat: [nominal]
this category: [+F, +N, –V]
subcat: [(nominal)]
he category: [+F, +N, –V]
subcat: [(∆)]
In these lexical entries, the and a are indicated to be determiners that have an
obligatory nominal complement, while this has an optional complement and he has no
complement. Thus this may be used as a pronoun (i.e. a determiner used without a
nominal complement) and he is always used as a pronoun.
3.5.3 Degree Adverbs
So far we have looked at auxiliary verbs, which accompany verbs, and determiners,
which accompany nouns, classifying these as functional equivalents of the categories
they accompany. The obvious choice for functional adjectives, therefore, are the
degree adverbs that accompany them:
(166) a so light
b too heavy
c as thick (as a brick)
Thus we might categorise these elements as [+F, +N, +V].
It is a complex, but interesting question as to what counts as a degree adverb.
Firstly, these elements are used primarily to indicate the degree to which the state or
property expressed by an adjective holds of something. But there are a number of
elements that do this, not all of which seem to behave the same:
(167) a too strong
b very fast
c quite real
d extremely tiring
Some of these degree modifiers are in complementary distribution with each other,
indicating that they belong to the same category:
(168) a too so tall
b so as wide
c *as too long
However, others are not in complementary distribution: