Hi, all

I've got a pile of marking that I'm desperately avoiding, so here goes another long message. Apologies to anyone who's not interested.

On 2010-10-08, at 2:07 PM, Craig wrote:

>    I like your point that these are categories, not definitions.

Thanks, but I can't take credit. I got that from Arnold Zwicky. I don't have many original ideas. I just do my best at cobbling together those I stumble across.

>    I would agree with most of the observations, though I have always had trouble with the idea that adverbial structures can't act as copular or predicate complements.

Even though labels aren't definitions, too many people treat them as if they were. The result is confusion. "Adverbial" is one of these. You would think that if something is "adverbial" it's an adverb. But one is a function and the other is a category and they shouldn't be conflated. I prefer to use 'adjunct' or 'modifier' for the "adverbial" functions.

> "I put the ladder in the shed" I would analyze as having an adverbial complement, as I would "the ladder is in the shed." We can also say "The time is now" or "The meeting right now is important," where "right now" acts as complement to "be" and adjunct to the noun.  Is "now" a preposition as well? The argument begins to fall apart when we take the category of adverb and pull out of it anything that doesn't fit the new test. If it can complement "be" it is not an adverb. Adverbs can't complement "be." It seems circular.

Yes, 'now' is a preposition. (A reasonably complete list can be found here: <http://simple.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Prepositions>). If ability to function as a predicate complement were the sole classifying characteristic, then, yes, I'd agree it was circular, but as I tried to show, there are a whole cluster of characteristics which apply to prototypical preposition (like 'from') and not to prototypical adverbs (like 'certainly'). For instance, you can say, as you point out, 'right now' but not (in standard dialect) 'right certainly'.

>    We also have what I would see as another problem. We have some words that act like adverbs, but never act like propositions in the old sense (as taking noun phrase head.) We have some (like before) that act as adverbs, take NP heads, and act as heads of clauses. We have others that can head a subordinate clause, but can't take NP heads and can't act alone as adverbs. So we have, in the same category (of preposition) some words that have nothing in common with each other.

Not at all. They have lots in common with each other. Admittedly, they don't share is a single type of complement, but no category does. Take verbs: some are mono-transitive and some intransitive, some are di-trainsitive, and some are complex transitive. Some take content clause complements, some 'to'-infinitive complements, some bare infinitives, some present participles, some predicate complements. Yet nobody's going to say these verbs have nothing in common.

> To me, that's the biggest stretch. It's like saying that some words are both nouns and verbs, some are adjectives and nouns, some are all three, so we should treat this as one category.

No, because as verbs, they can typically be modified by adverbs whereas as nouns they can't. They have different morphological stems. They often have quite different definitions. etc.

>    The other quarrel I would have, which is my quarrel with formal grammar for the most part, is that we often seem to think of classification as the primary goal. The language is not neat and clean, and often there are functional ways to explain fluidity that  I just find more productive.

Well, I don't think anybody here is willing to throw away the parts of speech. So, it seems to me that if you're going to employ a classification system, you endeavour to make that system as good as possible. 

Admittedly, 'good' entails a purpose (good for what?). Grammatical description is for more than language teaching (though that is obviously the main focus of this forum). Natural language processing (search, translation, information extraction, etc.) and corpus linguistics is often predicated on the categories that we assign. If we define more parsimonious categories, it's likely that computers will be more successful in doing with them what we require. But I've seen nothing that shows that these categories are any worse for language teaching, and my gut tells me they're better.

Best,
Brett

-----------------------
Brett Reynolds
English Language Centre
Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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