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Half and other unique words

Corpus patterns and lexicalist syntax
  • Maarten Janssen
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Word Classes
This chapter is in the book Word Classes

Abstract

Word classes play a fundamental role in many parts of linguistics. Yet, when looking at words individually, there is a large ‘class’ of words that does not behave like any other. This is illustrated here by describing the idiosyncratic behaviour of one such word: half. Half is labeled in many different ways: an adjective, a predeterminer, a quantifier, but it does not behave like any of these. For an accurate modeling of the combinatorics of half, and many other words like it, a more lexically driven approach is needed, since merely assigning them to a word class does not do their behaviour justice. This article describes how the behaviour or half, and other non-classifiable words, can be modeled in an extended version of Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA), a framework that represents the behaviour of words, typically verbs, by generalizing over their actual occurrences in corpus data.

Abstract

Word classes play a fundamental role in many parts of linguistics. Yet, when looking at words individually, there is a large ‘class’ of words that does not behave like any other. This is illustrated here by describing the idiosyncratic behaviour of one such word: half. Half is labeled in many different ways: an adjective, a predeterminer, a quantifier, but it does not behave like any of these. For an accurate modeling of the combinatorics of half, and many other words like it, a more lexically driven approach is needed, since merely assigning them to a word class does not do their behaviour justice. This article describes how the behaviour or half, and other non-classifiable words, can be modeled in an extended version of Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA), a framework that represents the behaviour of words, typically verbs, by generalizing over their actual occurrences in corpus data.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Foreword and acknowledgements vii
  4. Introduction 1
  5. PART I. Types of word classes
  6. Carving verb classes from corpora 17
  7. Classes of creation verbs 37
  8. On Light Nouns 51
  9. The ‘new adjectives’ of Tswana 75
  10. The Chinese adjective as a word class 95
  11. Qualifying modifier encoding and adjectival typology 119
  12. PART II. Minor and neglected word classes
  13. Hungarian is a classifier language 141
  14. Cardinal numerals 161
  15. On the borders of neglected word classes 181
  16. PART III. Across word classes
  17. Between adjective and noun 203
  18. On decategorization and its relevance in German 227
  19. PART IV. Radical views: Do we really need word classes?
  20. Word-class features and reduplicative meaning 245
  21. Half and other unique words 263
  22. Index of languages 283
  23. Index of names 285
  24. Index of subjects 289
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.332.14jan

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Foreword and acknowledgements vii
  4. Introduction 1
  5. PART I. Types of word classes
  6. Carving verb classes from corpora 17
  7. Classes of creation verbs 37
  8. On Light Nouns 51
  9. The ‘new adjectives’ of Tswana 75
  10. The Chinese adjective as a word class 95
  11. Qualifying modifier encoding and adjectival typology 119
  12. PART II. Minor and neglected word classes
  13. Hungarian is a classifier language 141
  14. Cardinal numerals 161
  15. On the borders of neglected word classes 181
  16. PART III. Across word classes
  17. Between adjective and noun 203
  18. On decategorization and its relevance in German 227
  19. PART IV. Radical views: Do we really need word classes?
  20. Word-class features and reduplicative meaning 245
  21. Half and other unique words 263
  22. Index of languages 283
  23. Index of names 285
  24. Index of subjects 289
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