2.

4 Distibution

The grammar of a language determines how we construct the expressions of the language. The
grammar, however, does not refer to the individual words of the lexicon, telling us, for example, that the
word cat goes in position X in expression Y. We call the set of positions that the grammar determines to
be possible for a given category the distribution of that category. If the grammar determines the
distribution of categories, it follows that we can determine what categories the grammar works with by
observing distributional patterns: words that distribute in the same way will belong to the same
categories and words that distribute differently will belong to different categories.

The notion of distribution, however, needs refining before it can be made use of. To start with,
as we will see, sentences are not organised as their standard written representations might suggest: one
word placed after another in a line. We can see this by the following example:

(a) dogs chase cats

If distribution were simply a matter of linear order, we could define the first position as a
position for nouns, the second position for verbs and the third position for nouns again based on (a).
Sure enough, this would give us quite a few grammatical sentences:

(I) a dogs chase birds

b birds hate cats
c hippopotami eat apples
d etc

3.1 Categorial Features

One way to impose a system on elements is to use a set of features to distinguish between
them. Each category can then be defined in terms of a unique collection of these features, but they may
share some of the features with other categories, accounting for similarities between them. In
linguistics, binary features, i.e. those which can be valued in one of two ways (plus or minus), have been
found useful for producing systems of categorisation. For example, we might propose a feature [±F] (‘F’
to indicate functional) to distinguish between the thematic and functional categories. All thematic
categories would possess the [–F] feature and all functional categories would possess the [+F] feature. In
this way we can immediately distinguish between the two groups and account for why certain
categories are similar to others in terms of which feature they possess.

Other features that have been proposed include [±N] and [±V], first suggested by Chomsky
(1970). The ‘N’ and ‘V’ used in these features obviously do not stand for noun and verb as these
categories are to be defined by these features. However, the fact that nouns are categorised as being
[+N] and verbs as [+V] indicates that these features are meant to have something to do with these
categories. To some extent, it is irrelevant what the features ‘mean’. The important point is which
categories share which features and hence have something in common and which have different
features and hence are distinguished. From this perspective we could have used features such as [±1]
and [±2].
 To develop the system a little further, consider the intuitions that adjectives seem to have
something in common with nouns, as they are typically used to modify nouns, as in crazy kid or
thoughtful suggestion, but they also seem to have something in common with verbs, as they have
certain distributional properties in common:

In this example, rich is an adjective and running is a verb and obviously they can both appear in
similar environments. But if nouns and verbs are diametrically opposed to each other, how can
adjectives be similar to both? The answer is that adjectives share different features with both nouns and
verbs. Thus, we may categorise both nouns and adjectives as [+N] and both verbs and adjectives as [+V]
and in this way adjectives will share features with both nouns and verbs.

A further advantage of this system is that it places restrictions on what categories we can
suppose to exist, hence increasing its explanatory power. For example, we would not be entitled to
come up with an extra category without destroying the system developed. One way to add extra
possible categories within the system would be to declare another binary feature. But this would not
allow the addition of one extra category, but a further eight! Moreover, these extra categories would
have to be shown to be related and opposed to the existing categories in the same way that these are
related and opposed to each other.

Another way to extend the system, which we will be making some use of, relies on the notion of
underspecification of features. All the categories discussed above are fully specified for all the features,
so each is associated with a plus or minus value for all three features. Underspecification is a situation in
which one or more features is not specified for its value.

3.6 Functionally underspecified categories

In this section we will briefly discuss the possibility or four extra categories which differ from
the previous ones in that they are not specified for the [±F] feature. This means that they differ from
each other in terms of the specification of the [±N] and [±V] features, but they differ from the other
categories in that they are neither functional nor thematic.

We have pointed out that these auxiliary verbs do not behave like modals as they are not in
complementary distribution with them. In fact, aspectual auxiliaries are not in complementary
distribution with any I element:

(i) a he may have been shopping

b … for him to have been shopping
c he had been shopping
 This would suggest that they are not categorised in the same way as inflections. They appear to
be verbal elements as they inflect for almost the same set of things that verbs do (perfective have
inflects for tense (has/had), progressive be inflects for tense (is/was) and perfect aspect (been) and
passive be inflects for tense (is/was), perfect aspect (been) and progressive aspect (being)). However,
they are clearly not thematic elements in that they play no role in the thematic interpretation of the
sentence. Aspectual auxiliaries therefore share properties with verbs and inflections, but they cannot be
categorised as either.

There are nouns which do not appear to behave like thematic nouns and yet are clearly not
categorised as determiners either. Consider the following examples:

(i) a a bottle of wine

b a cup of tea
c a group of tourists

The italicised items in these examples appear to be nouns and yet they do not behave like other
nouns. If we compare these examples to the following we can see some obvious differences:

(ii) a a picture of the president

b the disposal of the evidence
c the door of the house

The nouns in (i) do not function as the main semantic element of the expression as do those in
(ii). Note that the expressions in (ii) refer to a picture, a disposal and a door respectively, but the
referents of the expressions in (i) are wine, tea and tourists respectively. One can pour a bottle of wine
and drink a cup of tea, but what is poured and drunk is not the bottle or the cup but the wine and the
tea. On the other hand, if one breaks a picture of the president or deplores the disposal of the evidence,
it is not the president that gets broken nor the evidence that is deplored.

The kind of nouns in (i) are called measure or group nouns and they differ from other nouns in
terms of their relationship to their complements. The complements of the nouns in (ii) are arguments of
those nouns and as such stand in a thematic relationship to them. In other words, these nouns are
thematic elements which have -grids in their lexical entries. Measure nouns do not stand in the same
relationship to their complements at all and in fact they appear to have a similar relationship to their
complements as quantifying determiners do to their nominal complements. This is not a thematic
relationship and hence it appears that these nouns are not thematic nouns. Clearly they are not
determiners either and hence they seem to be prime candidates to be analysed as non-thematic non-
functional nouns.

This concludes our typology of word categories. Although it has not been exhaustive, as there
are one or two categories that we have not discussed (conjunctions such as and and or for example), we
have covered all of the categories that we will be concerned with in the rest of this book and nearly all
of those made use of in the English language. How to include those we have not dealt with within the
system we have developed is not something we will touch on in this book.