Defining Criteria
At least three criteria are used in defining syntactic categories:
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- The type of meaning it expresses
- The type of affixes it takes
- The structure in which it occurs
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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
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