Word classes

Structuralists and generativists define word classes distributionally (Palmer 1971, Baker 2003, Aarts 2007), while cognitive linguists take a semantic (Langacker 1987a) or semantic-pragmatic approach (Croft 1991, 2001). Psycholinguistic research, by contrast, has shown that phonological properties also play a role (Kelly 1992, Monaghan et al. 2005). This study reports on a production experiment involving English nonce nouns and verbs. The data confirm the importance of phonology, whilst also suggesting that distributional facts are involved in lexical categorisation. Together with the existing psycholinguistic evidence, the results show that both the generative and cognitive models of word classes are too restricted. However, the usage-based model can accommodate the facts straightforwardly. This was already anticipated by Taylor (2002) but is worked out in more detail here by elaborating on his notion of phonological “sub-schemas” and by bringing together insights from Croft (1991, 2001) related to discourse propositional act constructions and recent suggestions by Langacker (2008b) concerning “summary scanning” and “sequential scanning”.

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The ‘nouniness’ of attributive adjectives and ‘verbiness’ of predicative adjectives: evidence from phonology

English Language and Linguistics ◽

10.1017/s1360674320000015 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 1-23

Author(s):

WILLEM B. HOLLMANN

Keyword(s):

American English ◽

Psycholinguistic Research ◽

Substantial Body ◽

Phonological Structure ◽

Word Classes ◽

Entire Word ◽

Radical Construction ◽

Overlapping Classes ◽

Theoretical Issues ◽

Attributive Adjectives

This article investigates prototypically attributive versus predicative adjectives in English in terms of the phonological properties that have been associated especially with nouns versus verbs in a substantial body of psycholinguistic research (e.g. Kelly 1992) – often ignored in theoretical linguistic work on word classes. Inspired by Berg's (2000, 2009) ‘cross-level harmony constraint’, the hypothesis I test is that prototypically attributive adjectives not only align more with nouns than with verbs syntactically, semantically and pragmatically, but also phonologically – and likewise for prototypically predicative adjectives and verbs. I analyse the phonological structure of frequent adjectives from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and show that the data do indeed support the hypothesis. Berg's ‘cross-level harmony constraint’ may thus apply not only to the entire word classes noun, verb and adjective, but also to these two adjectival subclasses. I discuss several theoretical issues that emerge. The facts are most readily accommodated in a usage-based model, such as Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001), where these adjectives are seen as forming two distinct but overlapping classes. Drawing also on recent research by Boyd & Goldberg (2011) and Hao (2015), I explore the possible nature and emergence of these classes in some detail.

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A pragmatic approach to teaching clinical physical diagnosis

Journal of Dental Education ◽

10.1002/j.0022-0337.1981.45.9.tb01491.x ◽

1981 ◽

Vol 45 (9) ◽

pp. 585-588

Author(s):

MJ Kutcher ◽

TF Meiller ◽

CD Overholser

Keyword(s):

Pragmatic Approach ◽

Physical Diagnosis ◽

Approach To Teaching

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Accuracy of Four Language Analysis Procedures Performed Automatically

American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology ◽

10.1044/1058-0360(2001/017) ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 10 (2) ◽

pp. 180-188 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Steven H. Long ◽

Ron W. Channell

Keyword(s):

Automatic Identification ◽

Published Data ◽

Typically Developing ◽

Language Impaired ◽

Productivity Data ◽

Language Analysis ◽

Word Classes ◽

Human Coder ◽

Impaired Children ◽

Metalinguistic Skills

Most software for language analysis has relied on an interaction between the metalinguistic skills of a human coder and the calculating ability of the machine to produce reliable results. However, probabilistic parsing algorithms are now capable of highly accurate and completely automatic identification of grammatical word classes. The program Computerized Profiling combines a probabilistic parser with modules customized to produce four clinical grammatical analyses: MLU, LARSP, IPSyn, and DSS. The accuracy of these analyses was assessed on 69 language samples from typically developing, speech-impaired, and language-impaired children, 2 years 6 months to 7 years 10 months. Values obtained with human coding and by the software alone were compared. Results for all four analyses produced automatically were comparable to published data on the manual interrater reliability of these procedures. Clinical decisions based on cutoff scores and productivity data were little affected by the use of automatic rather than human-generated analyses. These findings bode well for future clinical and research use of automatic language analysis software.

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