morphological and distributional criteria

The set of part of speech labels (or pos tags) used in the British National Corpus (BNC) is particularly important for us. Parts of speech are also important in the context of Corpus linguistics. /rebates/&252fmorphological-and-syntactic-changes.And, as in u sh thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of ame, Came whi ing through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came Even if we don’t know its meaning, formal and distributional criteria help people (and machines) recognize which (open. For some general comments on parts of speech, see the page on Lexical Categories from the General Linguistics ( Syntax) section of ELLO. Importance of formal and distributional criteria Often in reading, we come acrossunknown words.Based on this distinction, the parts of speech are grouped intoįollow these links to get the details about the different parts of speech in English! In linguistics, a basic distinction is made between words that are more lexical, such as nouns and verbs, and words that are more functional or 'grammatical', such as determiners or conjunctions. they characteristically have a comparative and a superlative), this word poses a problem for the criterion, since it arguably does not have degrees: * dead-er, * the dead-est. Assuming that adjectives can be grouped together on the basis of their having degrees (i.e. Looking at the 'shape of a word' to determine the class the word belongs to can be called a morphological criterion.Īgain, the determination of a word's class on morphological criteria alone has its limits. So we might generally say what makes a verb a verb is the fact that they take agreement and tense morphemes. We know that, in English, a tense affix (-ed) and a third-person singular (-s) affix can be attached to verbs. What kind of entity does the word denote? It will be hard to define the word exclusively on the basis of semantic criteria. Take, for example, the above definition of a noun, and consider words like sand. You can call the classification of words on the basis of their meaning a semantic criterion.Īpproaching the classification of words by their semantics is fine, but doing so exclusively has certain shortcomings. Juveniles tend to be paler, brighter (more yellow green), and more uniformly colored than adults. Correspondingly, we can say that a noun denotes an entity, adverbs modify events and so on. Adults are cryptically colored on lichen-coveredlimbs and trunks, being mottled dark brown to pale gray, with small, scattered whitish flecks and patches, andoften faintly washed with yellow green. In other words, a verb's meaning has to do with events. In every sentence, every syntactic word has a part of speech.īut how can we tell whether, say, a verb is a verb? As a first approximation we can say that verbs refer to events. The classes that we use are called Parts of Speech (or lexical categories, or word classes). In a very similar vein, linguists classify words on the basis of certain features these words have in common. So what biologists do in this case is put animals in one class because they share certain characteristics. Mammals, for example, are vertebrates that lactate and have fur. Let us begin with some simple observations: Biologists tend to classify living beings on the basis of certain features.

Morphological and distributional criteria