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

[Linas Vepstas]

2009/11/2 Francis Bond <bond at ieee.org>:
> G'day,
>
> 2009/11/2 Mike Scott <mike at lexically.net>:
>>
>>>  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" :-).

Does anyone ever call these "zero nouns" or "phantom nouns" (in
analogy to "zero copula")?  Is there an approrpriate term for this?
There are many more examples, some that seem to be allowed
only if there's an anaphore:

Mike came in first place, and John came in second [place].

Anyway, I have only skimmed over the "Meaning-Text Theory" of
Igor Mel'cuk, but, from what I recall, its focus on "phrasemes" and
"lexical functions" seems to imply that structure does not require
a theory of part-of-speech. But perhaps I'm completely wrong here.

--linas

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