Countability in English Nouns denoting physical entities: a Radical Construction Grammar analysis
نویسنده
چکیده
In this paper, I offer a Radical Constructon Grammar analysis of some aspects of countability in English. Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 1999, 2000, 2001, MS) shares with other construction grammars the assumption that all grammatical knowledge can be represented uniformly as a network of constructions, where ‘construction’ is taken to describe form-meaning pairings of grammatical structures of any type: atomic (lexical items) or complex (syntactic constructions), substantive (specific words or phrases) or schematic (having roles that are fillable by more than one element), bound (morphological) or free (syntactic); and any combination of the above. For example, the Numeral construction [NUM NOUN(-SG/-PL)] includes as elements independent syntactic units (NUM) and bound morphemes (-SG/-PL), and the Possessive construction [PSRPHRASE-’s PSDPHRASE] includes as an element the substantive form -’s.
منابع مشابه
Mass counts in World Englishes: A corpus linguistic study of noun countability in non-native varieties of English
Research on the morpho-syntax of non-native varieties of English has reported a widespread presence of mass noun pluralization such as baggages, equipments and softwares. In this paper we conducted a corpus linguistic study in order to provide empirically substantiated answers to this claim. We examined the purported prevalence of noun countability in World Englishes in a 1.9 billion-token mega...
متن کاملLearning the Countability of English Nouns from Corpus Data
This paper describes a method for learning the countability preferences of English nouns from raw text corpora. The method maps the corpus-attested lexico-syntactic properties of each noun onto a feature vector, and uses a suite of memory-based classifiers to predict membership in 4 countability classes. We were able to assign countability to English nouns with a precision of 94.6%.
متن کاملUsing an Ontology to Determine English Countability
In this paper we show to what degree the countability of English nouns is predictable from their semantics. We found that at 78% of nouns’ countability could be predicted using an ontology of 2,710 nodes. We also show how this predictability can be used to aid non-native speakers to determine the countability of English nouns when building a bilingual machine translation lexicon.
متن کاملArtifact Nouns: Reference and Countability
Formal semantic treatments of nominal reference have focused on natural kind nouns (Carlson 1980, Krifka et al. 1995), yet as has been widely recognized by anthropologists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, and others, artifacts (cup, furniture, chair) and natural kinds (dog, water, flower) differ critically in nature. We argue that these differences have important consequences for how artifa...
متن کاملA sense-based lexicon of count and mass expressions: The Bochum English Countability Lexicon
The present paper describes the current release of the Bochum English Countability Lexicon (BECL 2.1), a large empirical database consisting of lemmata from Open ANC (http://www.anc.org) with added senses from WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998). BECL 2.1 contains ≈ 11,800 annotated noun-sense pairs, divided into four major countability classes and 18 fine-grained subclasses. In the current version, BECL ...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
دوره شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2000