Brett,
I’m in a paper grind of my own, but I’m enjoying the talk. I admit that I didn’t fully think through my initial reaction to H&P, and I’m thankful for a chance to do that. I hope other people on the list will find it useful.
Verbs comprise a more unified category than you imply. All verbs inflect for tense and combine with be, have, do, and the modals in very uniform ways. Even transitivity categories are often fluid. And the verbs all dominate their predicates in the same way, constituting in that way a coherent way of representing the world. The fact that there are subcategories doesn’t at all mean that some verbs have nothing in common with other verbs.
I believe you can
find similarities between “away” and “before,” and you can find
similarities
between “before” and “because,” but I don’t see the connections
between “away”
and “because.” It seems a stretch to put them into the same group.
H & P
extend “preposition” in two different directions and stretch the
category to
the point where some elements have nothing in common with each
other. But I may be missing something.
I used “adverbial”
rather than “adverb” in our discussion because the category of
“adverb” is in contention. If I
decide that “soon” is an adverb (as it has traditionally been
categorized),
then I can examine how some adverbs behave by looking at “soon.”
We can say
“The end will be soon,” then that would show that some adverbs can
act as the
complement of “be.” But if you decide that acting as the
complement of “be”
would disqualify it as an adverb, then the discussion is a closed
one. It is,
as you say, less a matter of definition than classification.
"Soon", by the way, didn't show up on the wiktionary list.
I also don’t have quite the problem H & P have with “subordinating conjunction.” As I understand it, they want to disqualify a word as a subordinator if it adds meaning (and doesn’t simply subordinate.) But that, too, seems an arbitrary decision. I don’t think anyone who would defend traditional grammar ever thought subordinating conjunctions didn’t add meaning. They contrast, in my mind at least, with “coordinating conjunctions,” which also add meaning but leave the conjoined groups “coordinate” or equal. “I met Mary in Seattle” is potentially a sentence. If I put a “before” or “after” or “while” in front of it, I am not only combining it with another clause (by giving it a grammatical role within that clause, most likely adverbial), but am effectively downranking the clause into a subordinate status. This is not a trivial understanding. What “before” is doing in “Before I met Mary in Seattle” is very different from what it is doing in “I met Mary before” and both are different from “before the war,” and I’m not convinced that calling all three a preposition is an improvement over the status quo, especially if we bring “away” and “because” along for the ride. When H & P say “I met Mary in Seattle” is a dependent clause with “before” in front of it, that seems counter intuitive. “Before” is what makes it subordinate, granting the whole structure a syntactic role (usually adverbial) in another clause.
I agree that we
need to have categories, even if they are tentative, in order to
explore
language. If “preposition” widens out in this way, then we
obviously need
subcategories that would align somewhat with traditional groups.
(For example,
prepositions that can form prepositional phrases by taking NP
complements. Or
prepositions that can take clauses as complements).
Ultimately, we are disrupting the status quo without a
great deal of benefit.
Craig
[log in to unmask]" type="cite">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 [log in to unmask] To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/