[Lexicog] Slots and slot fillers (nee "Nouns")

[Rudolph Troike]

Whether a phonological sequence is a "word" or a "phrase" is sometimes in
the eye of the beholder, or depends on the structure of the language involved.
In English, we write prepositions with a space before and after them, but in
Turkish (and most SOV languages), what corresponds semantically (per Ron Moe)
is placed at the end of the phonological sequence, and is generally called
a "case suffix" or sometimes, if written with a space, a "postposition". In
English, the GENITIVE marker is written solid with what precedes (more later),
albeit with an apostrophe (-'s) [due to the false notion that arose in the
17th century that this was a contraction of "his" -- it was not so written
earlier nor is it in any other Germanic language] when the Genitive expression
(single or multiple words) _precedes_ the head Noun, but separately, as "of",
when the Genitive expression _follows_ the Noun.

(The "of", being weakly stressed, may encliticize to the Noun, and be written
solid with it, as "cup of coffee" becomes "cuppa coffee". -- As a digression,
this creates a problem grammatically and lexicographically, as the {GEN}
morpheme, in its allomorphic form "of", is detached phonologically from the
NP it is connected to grammatically; non-native speakers, encountering
"cuppa" in print, may wonder what it is and look for it in a dictionary [the
same problem, from different sources, applies to common orthographic forms
"hafta", "wanna", "gotta", and "coulda"]).

Charles Fries documented the fact that in Old English, the "Saxon Genitive"
was used 95% of the time and the "Romance Genitive" 5% of the time. By the
18th century this had reversed to 5% and 95%, respectively. Similarly, the
suffixed Genitive of Latin was replaced by a preposition "de/di" in the
modern Romance languages. It is clear, then, both from cross-linguistic
comparisons as well as from internal histories, that at the level of semantic
structure, the suffix and the preposition constitute the same linguistic
element, with different surface realizations based on positional differences
in surface structure.

Structuralists like Bloomfield, Bloch, Fries, Hill, Hockett, Pike, and Trager
all recognized the hierarchical difference between the syntactic position
and its filler(s). A common example of the time was the use of the single
word "fire" as a complete utterance, which ambiguously could be taken as
an imperative of a Verb, ordering guns to be shot, or as an elliptical
existential, alerting hearers to the (possible) presence of a fire. In the
first instance, "Fire!" was seen as filling the following hiearchical slots:

       Sentence
          |
       Predicate
          |
         Verb
          |
        Fire

To say that "fire" is merely a word, and nothing more, would be to miss the
whole significance of its use, and any valid grammar of English would have
to account for that. (I am reminded here of the distress expressed by a
fellow evening-class student in my Beginning Chinese course some years ago,
when the instructor mentioned that some word had two possible meanings,
when she insistently repeated her concern that she would not be able to
tell which meaning was intended. The wise instructor finally, after a
number of vain attempts to quiet her concern by illustrating contrasting
contexts in which the different meanings would be deployed, finally uttered
the memorable observation, "Madam, words do not normally occur outside of
sentences".)

As for the concern about the difference between words and phrases (apart
from the suffix~postposition/preposition example), the labels NP, VP, DP,
NumP, TP, etc., although usually verbalized as "noun phrase", etc., do
not mean "more than one word", but rather are simple formal designations
of slots within a hierarchical system. (Thanks to X-bar 'theory', the
exact significance of these labels has changed from the original
Transformational-Generative grammar, but that is a technical matter.)

No one I know would argue that "at this moment" is not a phrase, and
"now" is not a word, but in the following sentences, all would agree
that they are filling the same slot, AdvP-time (or some similar designation):

         He is leaving at this moment.
         He is leaving now.

Structural linguists were very much at pains to try to distinguish
terminologically between word-level category labels and slot-category labels.
Thus for them, both of these would be "Adverbials", but only "now" would be
an "Adverb". (Since morphological features were used to define word-classes,
"pretty" would be an "Adjective", because it could take the suffixes "-er"
and "-est", but "beautiful" could not be an "Adjective", though it could be
classified as an "Adjectival" because it could be compared periphrastically
by the use of "more" and "most".) Rigorous methodological purity was a
touchstone among many, perhaps most, structuralists.

     Rudy Troike






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