[Corpora-List] About Part of Speech in English and Chinese

[Francis Bond]

G'day,

2009/11/2 Mike Scott <mike at lexically.net>:
>
>> 1. We can say that '"through"' is a sort of shorthand for 'instance of the
>> word "through"'. Without the inverted commas or special intonation it
>> becomes difficult to interpret.
>
> Maybe.
>>
>>  2. Are you happy with "sooner" and "better" as nouns in "the sooner the
>> better"? Or "good" or "bad" or "ugly" in... well, you know. What about
>> "recently" as an adjective in (Pullum example again) "The winner recently of
>> [two prestigious awards]"? -- it modifies the noun "winner", but it doesn't
>> look like an adjective and doesn't even go in the right place.
>>
>
> I'm not saying there won't be difficulties or that recognising a noun is
> clear, simply by virtue of it being preceded by "the", but I do think that
> the assumption that a word has a "natural" in-built POS leads us into
> greater difficulties. But I would not want to set myself up as a grammarian
> or theoretical linguist. That was my twopenny worth. I'd be quite happy
> thinking of the good, the bad and the ugly as nouns, incidentally. Like the
> robbers, the bandits and the cowboys that they were.

I think that they behave differently enough that it is worth making a
distinction:

The very rich are different from you and me
* The rich is different
The rich are different from you and me
* The riches are different from you and me

* The very bandit from you and me
The bandit is different from you and me
* The bandit are different from you and me
The bandits are different from you and me

The simplest explanation seems to be that we can construct in English,
somewhat surprisingly, a noun phrase with no head noun, just a
determiner (normally definite) and an adjective.  It behaves in pretty
much all respects like a normal noun phrase with plural agreement
headed by "ones" (e.g. " the rich ones") just with no "ones" :-).

-- 
Francis Bond <http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/fcbond/>
Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies
Nanyang Technological University

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