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

[Mike Maxwell]

Mike Scott wrote:
> (1) church tower
> (2) tall tower
> it is clear that (2) is adjectival, but in the case of (1) some 
> linguistic theories will call church a noun (because that word-form 
> arguably is mainly used for nouns) while others would call it an 
> adjective because it is here premodifying a noun. The former theories 
> seem to act as if word-forms had a primary POS, rather as people have 
> their gender determined before birth, while latter theories allow for 
> the possibility that words may swing both ways, so to speak, depending 
> on the company they keep. 

Another difference between the two sets of theories is that the first 
theory says that phrase structure either allows for alternative 
"fillers", i.e. a rule like
    NP --> Det {Adj|N}* N
whereas the second theory says that in any given position, only one type 
of category can appear.  (I'm assuming a phrase structure theory here--I 
don't know enough about dependency grammar to say how this would carry 
over.)

Actually, there is another analysis of (1) and (2) that is probably 
better: a rule like
    NP --> Det Adj* N+
(that's a flat version; one might have intermediate levels of 
structure).  This analysis would account for the following distinction:
    a tall church tower
   *a church tall tower

Of course another distinction between 'church' and 'tall' in the above 
examples is that 'tall', but not 'church', allows pre-modification by 
words like 'very', 'really', 'extremely', 'slightly'.  I don't see how 
this result would follow if 'church' were an adjective in this environment.

> The second aspect concerns the information supplied in the context or 
> inferable from it. In the case of (3) ... chief distribution ...
> English simply does not tell us without more context whether we are 
> talking of the way chiefs (e.g. tribal chiefs) are distributed through a 
> population or territory, or whether we are talking of the main patterns 
> of distribution of something. Either way, chief premodifies 
> distribution. In POS tagging for such a case, the context may or may not 
> disambiguate so POS tagging will necessarily, for those linguists who 
> think word-forms have a predetermined POS, be varied.

True.  A drawback from an engineering point of view, but not necessarily 
from a linguist's point of view.
-- 
    Mike Maxwell (the other Mike)
    What good is a universe without somebody around to look at it?
    --Robert Dicke, Princeton physicist

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