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What part of speech is “the”? (2006)

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Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)

#81

Post by thaumasiotes »

vorg wrote: post #67
thaumasiotes wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A" and "the" are most certainly the same part of speech. There are many other words in the same category: many every my some his this Note that "my", "his", and "this" also mark definiteness on the noun phrase.

> "A" and "the" are most certainly the same part of speech. I disagree... > There are many other words in the same category: All these example words add semantic meaning to the noun phrase, and a primary sub-category for their use is whether the noun is countable (e.g. cat) or uncountable (e.g. salt): cats VS salt a cat/any cat, some cats, all cats/every cat VS some salt, all salt no cats, one cat, two cats, ... VS n…

"Some" is a perfect counterpart to "the", expressing only indefiniteness (regardless of noun number) where "the" expresses only definiteness:

    There's some guy out on the sidewalk erasing the chalk art.
It's more common to use "a" there, but not required.

Here are two English sentences in which a word appears solely to satisfy English syntactic requirements:

    Your house is big.
    It's raining outside.
While interesting, those sentences aren't arguments that "is" is not a verb, or that "it" is not a noun.

Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)

#82

Post by vorg »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #81
vorg wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "A" and "the" are most certainly the same part of speech. I disagree... > There are many other words in the same category: All these example words add semantic meaning to the noun phrase, and a primary sub-category for their use is whether the noun is countable (e.g. cat) or uncountable (e.g. salt): cats VS salt a cat/any cat, some cats, all cats/every cat VS some salt, all salt no cats, one cat, two cats, ... VS n…

"Some" is a perfect counterpart to "the", expressing only indefiniteness (regardless of noun number) where "the" expresses only definiteness: There's some guy out on the sidewalk erasing the chalk art. It's more common to use "a" there, but not required. Here are two English sentences in which a word appears solely to satisfy English syntactic requirements: Your house is big. It's raining outside. While interesting,…

> Here are two English sentences in which a word appears solely to satisfy English syntactic requirements

Not sure how that relates to what I'm saying about "the".

A minor note: the "is" in "Your house is big" is non-contractable, whereas in "It's raining outside" the "is" contracts, so they're really 2 different words.

Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)

#83

Post by thaumasiotes »

vorg wrote: post #82
thaumasiotes wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Some" is a perfect counterpart to "the", expressing only indefiniteness (regardless of noun number) where "the" expresses only definiteness: There's some guy out on the sidewalk erasing the chalk art. It's more common to use "a" there, but not required. Here are two English sentences in which a word appears solely to satisfy English syntactic requirements: Your house is big. It's raining outside. While interesting,…

> Here are two English sentences in which a word appears solely to satisfy English syntactic requirements Not sure how that relates to what I'm saying about "the". A minor note: the "is" in "Your house is big" is non-contractable, whereas in "It's raining outside" the "is" contracts, so they're really 2 different words.

The "is" in "your house is big" is not non-contractable, as can be seen here:

    It's big.
What are you saying about "the"? There are lots of words with essentially no (in the case of "it's raining", literally no) semantic content; they belong to various parts of speech just the same.

EDIT:

I want to also bring two more examples of "the" in English to your attention. The first was recently produced by me:

> It's a famous result that the people who believe premarital sex is wrong account for fairly little of the premarital sex.

"The premarital sex" has basically the same semantics as "all premarital sex", and the use of "the" is required for that effect.

Here's the second:

> In considering India it must always be borne in mind that here was the original seat of the Aryan civilization and that, though the Hindoo is as dark as many of the American negroes, he is of Aryan stock like ourselves.

( http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27233/27233-h/27233-h.htm )

Again, "the Hindoo" uses a "the" that cannot be interpreted anaphorically, and the noun phrase is in fact not linked to anything prior. It appears in the context already marked for definiteness.

Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)

#84

Post by hyperpape »

bane wrote: post #18
hyperpape wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading this, I have no idea if you're saying it because you know how modern syntactic theories work and how they're developed or if you're just saying it because you thought it sounded good. Don't leave us hanging!

I'll be perfectly honest, I'm half-serious, half-drunk-posting. But on simple inspection, the idea that a word can fit into a single category is obviously wrong. So to generalize the idea, you have to assume that a word can fit into multiple categories. Biology is undergoing a similar transformation from simple "this animal looks kinda like this one" to genomics classification, which is revolutionizing the tree of li…

Well, I share some of the instinctive scepticism about tidy theories of syntax/semantics.

But I don't have any real reason to claim that they don't work. Syntactic theories aim to explain why particular sentences are grammatical or ungrammatical (in the judgments of native speakers). If you can accurately do that, then yes, you've put each word into one category (as far as making up grammatical sentences). So to say the kind of thing you're saying, you'd have to explain why the current research programs in syntax are misguided.

Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)

#85

Post by Cushman »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #60
Cushman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If "brick ancient barn" is too plausible for you to get the full effect, try something with more diverse adjectives like "beef tasty stew" or "laptop lost bag".

You really do like fake examples. Can you point to a syntactician making the argument that the "beef" of "beef stew", or the "laptop" of "laptop bag", is an adjective? In any context I'm familiar with, that person would be laughed out of the room.

Fair point, apart from the invective. How do you feel about "hiking worn boots" or "mixed-breed adorable puppy"?

Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)

#86

Post by thaumasiotes »

Cushman wrote: post #85
thaumasiotes wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really do like fake examples. Can you point to a syntactician making the argument that the "beef" of "beef stew", or the "laptop" of "laptop bag", is an adjective? In any context I'm familiar with, that person would be laughed out of the room.

Fair point, apart from the invective. How do you feel about "hiking worn boots" or "mixed-breed adorable puppy"?

"Hiking boots" has the same problem -- the boots aren't themselves hiking, they're boots for use in hiking. That's another noun-noun compound.

"Mixed-breed puppy" is, to me, not such a clear case ("breed" is clearly originally a noun, but maybe this use is common enough to have converted). But you don't need to use spurious examples -- in another comment, you provided a very genuine one: "red" and "wooden" are both clearly adjectives, and their ordering cannot vary. This is a well-known example of a somewhat-but-not-entirely mysterious phenomenon in linguistics.

Here's a nice recent writeup of what I think is a related phenomenon: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2015/04/28/cutthroat-compoun... . This one consists of the observation that words like "kickass" and "pickpocket" are suppressed (not illegal, but suppressed) in English because they conflict with our tendency toward right-headedness (that is, in any English compound, the "essence" of the compound should be found at the right end). Instead, we incline more to compounds like "bank robber" or "nose-thumbing" ("engage in a bit of nose-thumbing"). Someone else in this thread already mentioned that they see adjective ordering as a question of which adjectives are more essential to the whole.

My problem with your comments here is that you're making arguments based on obviously spurious tests unrelated to the claims you then try to follow (um, lead) with. It's analogous to saying "We need to stop celebrating Thanksgiving by eating turkey. Turkey perpetrated the Armenian genocide, genocide is bad and should be stopped, QED". Stick to honest examples, and you'll find the problems you're talking about are rather muted. Don't let your feeling that the problems are large, and you therefore need extremely malformed examples, lead you into choosing examples that are extremely malformed because they exhibit a completely different problem.

Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)

#87

Post by Cushman »

peterfirefly wrote: post #49
Cushman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to keep you up, but what's even cooler is that the degree to which you can deviate depends on the adjective's class, too. While I can sorta see " brick ancient barn" working, albeit with such heavy emphasis on "brick" that "ancient barn" turns into a bit of a compound, "grain lone silo" or "fish dry pond" don't sound grammatical to me at all . Maybe also because "grain silo" and "fish pond" are almost-notquite co…

That ship has sailed. It's 06:40 and the sun has been pouring through my windows for more than an hour :/ The part of my body that has synched up with the daylight refuses to listen to the part that needs sleep. -- "Grain silo" and "fish pond" are exactly-precisely compound nouns. It's just that English refuses to accept that it's a Germanic language and instead puts on airs. Honest languages would of course never dr…

> "Grain silo" and "fish pond" are exactly-precisely compound nouns.

Eeeh, not exactly in English. English does make some distinction between fully compounded words and noun phrases, especially in rules of production. In a newer phrase like "wind farm", you can swap in more or less any noun you like, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense: "mud farm", "rock farm", "hair farm"... there's some rule like "substance + farm = a farm that produces that substance". With a word like "bedroom", you can get "bathroom", but not so much "deskroom"; there's no general rule like "furniture + room = room where that furniture is found". The space (in cases where it's pronounced) is kinda your hint there.

Anyway... I still don't believe in grammar, but y'all have mounted a spirited defense of the traditional analysis. I'm sorry I tried to say everything's an adjective :)

Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)

#88

Post by SilasX »

peterfirefly wrote: post #22
SilasX wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article points out, it's not really "wrong" to say "the" is an adjective: it functions exactly like one! It's only wrong in the sense of violating one of two equally useful classification systems. And this error doesn't even bubble up to the level of miscommunication, the only real sense in which you can say someone's usage is incorrect! Remember, in everyday use, you don't directly observe word classification…

> it's not really "wrong" to say "the" is an adjective: it functions exactly like one! The, theer, theest? The, more the, most the? The shoe was red but most importantly, it was the. She had never before seen so the a shoe! In the clearing was old a house with smoke rising from stone the chimney. Edit: couldn't decide on the number of shoes so I went for both singular and plural :(

Fair enough -- "exactly" was overreaching. But depending on circumstance, you may not need to distinguish adjectives from articles. For example, if you're writing something that turns text into an internal semantic model, then "the" gets lumped in with "large" as something that modifies a following noun.

It's still a judgment call whether they properly belong in different categories, and situation-dependent, so it's really not something that merits the "point and laugh" treatment.

Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)

#89

Post by SilasX »

mikekchar wrote: post #76
SilasX wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article points out, it's not really "wrong" to say "the" is an adjective: it functions exactly like one! It's only wrong in the sense of violating one of two equally useful classification systems. And this error doesn't even bubble up to the level of miscommunication, the only real sense in which you can say someone's usage is incorrect! Remember, in everyday use, you don't directly observe word classification…

Generally speaking, "the" needs to be interpretted from the speaker's point of view. Saying "I went to a store" implies that I had a wide choice of stores. Saying "I went to the store" implies that I didn't choose which store I went to. It's the store that I usually go to when I buy things. It doesn't necessarily mean that the listener knows which store I went to, or that there is only one store. Conversely, if I say…

>Generally speaking, "the" needs to be interpretted from the speaker's point of view. Saying "I went to a store" implies that I had a wide choice of stores. Saying "I went to the store" implies that I didn't choose which store I went to. It's the store that I usually go to when I buy things. It doesn't necessarily mean that the listener knows which store I went to, or that there is only one store.

I think we agree but are labeling it different. I meant the "listener knowledge" broadly -- you seem to agree that using "the" requires some understanding on the listener's part that there's something that narrows down which store and makes it definite, even if it's not enough for them to pick it out. In this case, that the listener somehow knows that there is some store you must be thinking of.

But the "store" usage still seems to break this: people use it even there's no reason for the list to believe the speaker is thusly restricted!

Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)

#90

Post by thaumasiotes »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #83
vorg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here are two English sentences in which a word appears solely to satisfy English syntactic requirements Not sure how that relates to what I'm saying about "the". A minor note: the "is" in "Your house is big" is non-contractable, whereas in "It's raining outside" the "is" contracts, so they're really 2 different words.

The "is" in "your house is big" is not non-contractable, as can be seen here: It's big. What are you saying about "the"? There are lots of words with essentially no (in the case of "it's raining", literally no) semantic content; they belong to various parts of speech just the same. EDIT: I want to also bring two more examples of "the" in English to your attention. The first was recently produced by me: > It's a famou…

To pre-empt a potential reply: you can make the fact that the "is" of "your house is big" contracts freely even more stupid-obvious like so:

    Your dog's big.
If it did contract in "your house is big", it would have exactly the same pronunciation, so there's not really much grounds to say it isn't contracted even in that specific sentence.
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