Syntactic Category - Defining Criteria

Defining Criteria

At least three criteria are used in defining syntactic categories:

  1. The type of meaning it expresses
  2. The type of affixes it takes
  3. The structure in which it occurs

For instance, many nouns in English denote concrete entities, they are pluralized with the suffix -s, and they occur as subjects and objects in clauses. Many verbs denote actions or states, they are conjugated with agreement suffixes (e.g. -s of the third person singular in English), and in English they tend to show up in medial positions of the clauses in which they appear.

The third criterion is also known as distribution. The distribution of a given syntactic unit determines the syntactic category to which it belongs. The distributional behavior of syntactic units is identified by substitution. Like syntactic units can be substituted for each other.

Read more about this topic:  Syntactic Category

Famous quotes containing the words defining and/or criteria:

    Art, if one employs this term in the broad sense that includes poetry within its realm, is an art of creation laden with ideals, located at the very core of the life of a people, defining the spiritual and moral shape of that life.
    Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)

    Every sign is subject to the criteria of ideological evaluation.... The domain of ideology coincides with the domain of signs. They equate with one another. Wherever a sign is present, ideology is present, too. Everything ideological possesses semiotic value.
    —V.N. (Valintin Nikolaevic)