[Lexicog] Nouns

[David Frank]

from David Frank:

It wasn't just Chomsky who followed this practice of calling single words 
"noun phrases" in some contexts. As a student of Ken Pike, I know that in 
tagmemic theory a minimal noun phrase could be a single word, just as a 
minimal sentence could be a single simple clause or even a single word, and 
in fact a text could be a single word. I don't think it is just that these 
theoreticians failed to notice that what they were calling phrases were 
actually words, but rather they were trying to develop generative rules. 
Otherwise you have to say that an English clause (or to some, sentence) is 
made up of a noun or a noun phrase followed by a verb or a verb phrase. The 
explanation is that a noun phrase has a noun nucleus and various optional 
determiners and modifiers. Makes sense to me, and that is the way I teach 
it.

I believe the notion of a noun phrase been replaced in some varieties of 
syntactic theory with DP, "determiner phrase," but my friend Mike McSwell or 
someone else could tell more about that than I could.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Maxwell" <maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2006 11:57 PM
Subject: Re: [Lexicog] Nouns


Ron Moe wrote:
> Some theories of syntax confuse the situation by calling 'grits' a NP.
> Sorry, but it is not a phrase. A phrase by definition consists of more 
> than
> one word...
 > Just because Chomsky stuck the label 'NP'
 > on a particular node in a syntactic tree doesn't suddenly
 > make 'grits' a noun phrase.

Well, I could argue that, but I won't...

> Chomsky should have searched for a better label.

He was just using a different definition, one that didn't rely on
counting the number of words, but rather relied on the function that
word(s) could have in higher level (clausal) syntax.  And I'm not sure
he was the first.



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