Edmund,

It's not only in historical change that categories are shown to be
fuzzy.  Your excellent example with "may" demonstrates the ease with
which we can make a word fit a different category to powerful effect.
This works better with some categories than with others.  We can noun
just about anything, as you did with "may."  We can also "verb" pretty
easily, and some interesting papers have been published on this process.
Of course, it's a maxim of English grammar that "Any noun can be
verbed."  It's a little more difficult to turn nouns and verbs into
adjectives, and I'm not talking about obvious cases like words for color
and provenance.  With "may," we could say, "Bill and Hank are two more
mays."  So that modal can be nouned and then take on noun morphology.
It's more difficult to assign adjective morphology to a noun.  We can
say "a book fair" but not so easily "the bookest fair I've been to,"
although one could construct a context in which it would work.  I
suspect that we can shift words into open class categories much more
readily than into closed class categories.  Turning a noun or verb into
a preposition or conjunction is a bit harder to do.  There are
constraints on these processes, but I'm not sure they've been thoroughly
explored.

Herb 

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Edmond Wright
Sent: 2008-02-23 06:05
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Form and function

I'm not a linguist, Herb, but a philosopher, so I am learning from you.
You
acknowledge that words can be moved about as regards function, but you
say
that there are 'strict conditions'.  Yet the conditions are not so
strict
since anyone, given sufficient purpose and imagination, can wangle them
into
another slot.  Take 'may':  "I wouldn't rely on him -- he's just a may."
But of course we still sense the oddity, so we remain aware of the
customary
use in the game as it is played at this historical juncture.

The feel of words belonging primarily to one function surely comes from
the
fact that these are the habitual usages within the 'rules' at this time.
Your 'seethe/sodden' example nicely shows how the sense of word-class
can be
obvious and active at one time and be wholly abandoned at another -- the
usage of a word within the 'rules' has changed -- what started as an odd
'one-off' got picked up by others and became general (or, with 'sodden',
perhaps it was that the verb use just faded out).  I must concede that
we
can abstract from these changes and note about the game that there are
slots
apart from what fills them at any time:  thus surely we can distinguish
verb
from noun in the abstract sense, in the relative placing of these slots
in
syntax, but, as your example, well shows, we have to hold back from
saying
that some word now used as a verb is intrinsically and eternally a
'verb' or
a 'noun' -- 'sodden' isn't a 'verb' anymore.

Edmond


Dr. Edmond Wright
3 Boathouse Court
Trafalgar Road
Cambridge
CB4 1DU
England

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