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:

    “The U.S. is becoming an increasingly fatherless society. A generation ago, an American child could reasonably expect to grow up with his or her father. Today an American child can reasonably expect not to. Fatherlessness is now approaching a rough parity with fatherhood as a defining feature of American childhood.”
    —David Blankenhorn (20th century)

    “The Hacker Ethic: Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total.
    Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
    All information should be free.
    Mistrust authority—promote decentralization.
    Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
    You can create art and beauty on a computer.
    Computers can change your life for the better.”
    —Steven Levy, U.S. writer. Hackers, ch. 2, “The Hacker Ethic,” pp. 27-33, Anchor Press, Doubleday (1984)