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What part of speech is “the”? (2006)

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

#61

Post by thaumasiotes »

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…

English draws this distinction for gold, with gold (n) and golden (adj).

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

#62

Post by thaumasiotes »

vorg wrote: post #54
cjhveal wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be noted, however, that while many languages get by without explicitly marking definiteness, there are other linguistic techniques that can provide similar contextual clues that are required for understanding the pragmatic meaning of an utterance. Topic-comment structures[1] are often used to convey a sense of what is assumed as new versus known information. For instance, Russian's relatively free word orde…

I would say that the definiteness use of "the", perhaps alone among English words, doesn't even have a part of speech because it's related to the thematic structure of English, whereas parts of speech are defined in the grammatical structure of languages. So "a" and "the" are different animals in a way, and perhaps shouldn't even be taught together.

"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.

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

#63

Post by thaumasiotes »

philsnow wrote: post #55
peterfirefly wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Noun phrases need determiners on them or they feel ungrammatical. Nature abhors a vacuum. One giant leap for mankind. The rules for when articles can/must be left out are quite complicated :(

Read on: > Proper nouns like George Washington don't need a determiner. "Nature" is a proper noun (there is, after all, only one.). "One" is a determiner. "mankind" is a proper noun. Absolutely agree that, in colloquial English, the rules for when articles / determiners (and any other part of speech really) can be elided are complicated. I quite routinely ask people "time is it", leaving out the "what".

No, mankind is not a proper noun. It's a mass noun, like sand, iron, or snow.

Mass nouns and plural nouns don't necessarily need determiners, depending on how you're using them.

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

#64

Post by peterfirefly »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #61
peterfirefly wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

English draws this distinction for gold, with gold (n) and golden (adj).

I actually meant: written in one word (stonechimney, a compound noun) or not (stone chimney, not a compound noun).

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

#65

Post by unhammer »

bane wrote: post #3

Part of the problem of course if the naive notion that you can fit words into a single grammatical category, like species in a taxonomy, while word usage ends up defying this simplification. The real problem is that taxonomic classification is rarely correct in nature.

You may find http://www.amazon.com/Fuzzy-Grammar-Reader-Bas-Aarts/dp/0199... interesting

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

#66

Post by unhammer »

philsnow wrote: post #53
Animats wrote: post #45

This was resolved years ago in the linguistics community. There are open-class words, which in English are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. New open-class words can easily be added to the language. There are closed-class words, about a hundred of them, although opinions differ on this.[1] Some lists have "the" as a closed-class word, others have it as an an adverb. Closed-class words are treated like keywords i…

I would argue that "the" is a determiner, and the class of determiners is mostly closed. A determiner is the root of a determiner phrase. A determiner phrase can consist of only the root, like "the" or "a", but it can also be more complex like "every other", "uncomfortably few", or "90% of". (This is all from chomsky's x-bar theory [0], which dates back to the 60s. I'm not aware of another model of syntax that better…

Well, you've got https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_functional_grammar and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-driven_phrase_structure_g... which are both model-theoretic grammars (see http://www.researchgate.net/publication/220718697_On_the_Dis... ). In short, grammar rules are constraints that have to unify in order to describe a grammatical utterance, instead of phrase-structure rules that generate sentences.

And there are newer theories that are much more compatible with a probabilistic / data-oriented outlook, even combining this with the model-theoretic grammar: http://www.nclt.dcu.ie/lfg-dop/

People into semantics seem to like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar which I never learnt much about. Oh and there's also the Meaning-Text theory, Relational Grammar and various dependency-based frameworks, Optimality Theory applied to syntax, … it goes on and on :)

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

#67

Post by vorg »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #62
vorg wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that the definiteness use of "the", perhaps alone among English words, doesn't even have a part of speech because it's related to the thematic structure of English, whereas parts of speech are defined in the grammatical structure of languages. So "a" and "the" are different animals in a way, and perhaps shouldn't even be taught together.

"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 no salt, some salt
    few cats, many cats                          VS little salt, much salt
    my cat/s, our cat/s, your cat/s              VS my salt, our salt, your salt
    his cat/s, her cat/s, its cat/s, their cat/s VS his salt, her salt, its salt, their salt
    this cat, that cat, these cats, those cats   VS this salt, that salt
The article "a" is only used with countable nouns (unless an uncountable is being used as a countable with meaning "a type of") and so fits into this sub-categorization.

> Note that "my", "his", and "this" also mark definiteness on the noun phrase.

In those cases the demonstrative is adding semantic information to the noun, whether possession ("my", "his") or location ("this").

If we split "A cat sitting on the rug meows." into the 2 sentences "A cat is sitting on the rug. The cat meows.", the only function of the "the" in the second sentence is to provide a cohesive link to something in the first sentence. Similarly, "Some salt stored in the shaker spills." can be split into "Some salt is stored in the shaker. The salt spills." This makes "the" solely a cohesive device, independent of the semantics and in the domain of thematics. So "a" and "the" are used orthogonally, each in different ways of analyzing an utterance.

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

#68

Post by jschwartzi »

falsedan wrote: post #50
Cushman wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed! Although I'd argue that probably is what it's supposed to mean. A "leather horse saddle" and a "horse leather saddle" are very different things, and no native English speaker would mix them up. You know which they mean.

What's your point?

That one is for horses, and the other is from horses.

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

#69

Post by cafard »

SilasX wrote: post #19
tedd4u wrote: post #12

I'm surprised the author has run in to so many that don't seem to have learned about articles. Isn't this one of the most basic topics in middle-school grammar? I'm pretty sure "the" is one of the most common words in the language after all. I was taught in 6th or 7th grade that "the" is the definite article. As opposed to "a" which is an indefinite article. For those that are fuzzy on the concept this is the best on…

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 has been a while since junior high, but I believe they taught us that articles were a subset of adjectives.

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

#70

Post by cafard »

escherplex wrote: post #58
cjhveal wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be noted, however, that while many languages get by without explicitly marking definiteness, there are other linguistic techniques that can provide similar contextual clues that are required for understanding the pragmatic meaning of an utterance. Topic-comment structures[1] are often used to convey a sense of what is assumed as new versus known information. For instance, Russian's relatively free word orde…

Good observations. It's also interesting to look back 2K years at the kingpin Eurasian languages for evidence of definite/indefinite articles. From right to left, ancient Chinese (probably) lacked the qualifier but was exposed to its existence via the silk road (which used the lingua franca Aramaic which had them) and also through exposure to the Greek Buddhist colonies in North India (ancient Greek had a definite ar…

In Homeric Greek, the definite article is more of a demonstrative adjective, isn't it, more "that man" rather than "the man"? And Greek hung on as the language of administration in the eastern part of the empire.
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