10 ms·

What part of speech is “the”? (2006)

47 points by synesso 11y ago

iGoPro_HD 11y ago
I thought that I was the only one who was never taught this. Go public school system!
- emidln 11y ago
  You never covered articles?
  - iGoPro_HD 11y ago
    Not in the depth that it should have been.
    - ilitirit 11y ago
      I don't think there's much you can say about them at high school level. All we were taught was that "the" is the definite article and that "a" is the indefinite article.
bane 11y ago
Part of the problem of course if the naive notion that you can fit words into a single grammatical category, like species in a taxonomy, while word usage ends up defying this simplification. The real problem is that taxonomic classification is rarely correct in nature.
- hyperpape 11y ago
  Reading this, I have no idea if you're saying it because you know how modern syntactic theories work and how they're developed or if you're just saying it because you thought it sounded good. Don't leave us hanging!
  - bane 11y ago
    I'll be perfectly honest, I'm half-serious, half-drunk-posting. But on simple inspection, the idea that a word can fit into a single category is obviously wrong. So to generalize the idea, you have to assume that a word can fit into multiple categories. Biology is undergoing a similar transformation from simple "this animal looks kinda like this one" to genomics classification, which is revolutionizing the tree of living things used by biologists to organize living things. There's not really any reason why words, a biological artifact, have been correctly classified all along. Hell! A copy-editor neighbor and I have minor quarrels over the capitalization of college subject names. Trees are a specialization of graphs, and they're usually wrong. Just assume graphs to start with and your data will organize much better, even if the properties of the organizational metaphor aren't quite as nice.
    - hyperpape 11y ago
      Well, I share some of the instinctive scepticism about tidy theories of syntax/semantics. But I don't have any real reason to claim that they don't work. Syntactic theories aim to explain why particular sentences are grammatical or ungrammatical (in the judgments of native speakers). If you can accurately do that, then yes, you've put each word into one category (as far as making up grammatical sentences). So to say the kind of thing you're saying, you'd have to explain why the current research programs in syntax are misguided.
- sethjgore 11y ago
  That's true. Ask a simple group of 5 linguists and they all will give you different answers. This literally happened in a workshop we gave at a college months ago. Quite funny. While working on grmmr (green-bridge.org) we recognized that so many of us are densely confused when it comes to these metalinguistics. So we just stopped using knives that dissected (metalinguistics) words into words and went for friendlier marker (symbols and colors). We need to be reminded that a lot of it is just pretend and educated guesses, no absolutes. Markers seem to work better here than knives do when teaching and categorizing language grammar.
- unhammer 11y ago
  You may find http://www.amazon.com/Fuzzy-Grammar-Reader-Bas-Aarts/dp/0199262578/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1436174326&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Fuzzy-Grammar-Reader-Bas-Aarts/dp/0199... interesting
sethjgore 11y ago
"The deeper problem is the school tradition itself. It's a TRADITION, after all" Interesting point and I agree. Why are we identifying metalinguistics with words anyway? Why not just use symbols so we can actually compare them across languages? Is the tradition so inherently rigid and stuck to the written/spoken languages - rather than moving beyond words and use a system of symbols? The tradition obsufcates the universality of grammar and semantics by adding words atop words rather than simple symbolism. Doesn't this make internalization harder? You don't teach math just by numbers but also with symbols and real-world references. As for internalization and understanding what and where 'the' belongs...There has been astounding success in identification and understanding when metalinguistics is entirely removed and replaced with simple symbols like grmmr (http://green-bridge.org http://green-bridge.org). I've seen results upfront and it seems a non-word approach eases and solidifies linguistic understanding in ways far more profoundly than metalinguistics ever can. Teachers and students alike have said this system has taken away all the cloud of uncertainty in language grammar and semantics. If you are a linguist and you are interested in helping grmmr become a standard in the studies of metalinguistics, please do let me know! I'm the design partner of the company. We are eager to open source this knowledge into a simple but reliable notation. This system has been in use for over 20 years in classrooms, colleges, and adult education programs. It has been redesigned from bottom up in order to be as accessible and consistent as you would expect from a grammar categorizing system.
kmicklas 11y ago
Linguistics is the only field I can think of where the general public does not take seriously the knowledge of the experts (linguists).
- umanwizard 11y ago
  Climate science, evolutionary biology, ...
  - sethjgore 11y ago
    Graphic Design
  - Cushman 11y ago
    I actually think this comparison is quite apt. Like those others, the science of linguistics has become heavily politicized in the US, most notably regarding the validity of AAVE as a first language. Though I'd still argue linguistics has it worse. You don't really expect people in educated society to get into heated arguments with the 10-day weather forecast, or jump in to correct your "biology mistakes" while you're eating...
    - umanwizard 11y ago
      Spot on. Disdain for Ebonics is one of the last remaining ways in which it's considered acceptable in polite society to be blatantly racist.
- sethjgore 11y ago
  Probably because most of it is just useless to the general public? Metalinguistics isn't really the place for people to jump onto and use as the base to improve their language understanding. A lot of it is exceedingly jargon and thus completely inaccessible.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ScootyPuff2000 11y ago
alricb 11y ago
These days, in Quebec, French (as a first language) is taught using a more-or-less linguistically correct approach, with articles called determiners, dividing sentences into groups and using transformations to understand interrogative sentences. In my days we used a more traditional system, and the time we spent doing grammar analysis was very tedious; we only approached the subject in secondary school. These days they are taught to analyse sentences in 3rd-4th grade and up.
tedd4u 11y ago
I'm surprised the author has run in to so many that don't seem to have learned about articles. Isn't this one of the most basic topics in middle-school grammar? I'm pretty sure "the" is one of the most common words in the language after all. I was taught in 6th or 7th grade that "the" is the definite article. As opposed to "a" which is an indefinite article. For those that are fuzzy on the concept this is the best online reference I found: https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english-grammar/determiners-and-quantifiers/definite-article https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english-grammar/d...
- sethjgore 11y ago
  It is simple, yet a large percentage of the users misuse and misunderstand "the" on a daily basis. The existing instruction systems arent usually focused on teaching us grammar and semantics on an inutitive and experiential level where we understand completely the difference between a pen and the pen. The existing linguistic models aren't meant for comprehension but rather for identification. I believe this is why so many of us still misuse "the" grossly. Let's not jump on what is an "article" when explaining to e or just about any student, especially those who are trying to learn English! :)
- hobo_mark 11y ago
  So was I, and I'm not even a native speaker. Things like this and the countless typos I see every day make me question what on earth people are taught in school over there if not how to read and right (ha!). It's not like I had a fancy education or anything, I grew up in a mostly rural part of Europe with a (still today) shitty economy.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- SilasX 11y ago
  As the article points out, it's not really "wrong" to say "the" is an adjective: it functions exactly like one! It's only wrong in the sense of violating one of two equally useful classification systems. And this error doesn't even bubble up to the level of miscommunication, the only real sense in which you can say someone's usage is incorrect! Remember, in everyday use, you don't directly observe word classification. So unless someone goes Archeresque and says "I saw the movie -- in which I of course mean 'the' to be an adjective", there's no sense in which that mistake is common either. With that said, I think there is a substantive, common misuse of "the", but it's not what the article describes. Rather, it's when people say eg "I went to the store", when the speaker and listener don't have a common reference point that would justify "definiteness". I've always felt these should be "a store", since there are so many they could be referring to. (It's fine when there really is only one store they could be referring to.)
marze 11y ago
The purpose of "the" is to reset the vocal tract to a neutral configuration, allowing the subsequent (and more arbitrary) word to be resolved more readily.
- RaptorJ 11y ago
  Are there words that function the same way in Chinese, Latin or Greek?
- vfdva 11y ago
  Source?
tokenadult 11y ago
The author of the submitted, um, article (blog post) didn't cover all the ground that could be covered on this issue, because it was an off-hand post. The previous comments here on Hacker News prompt me to bring up one more issue: even if we follow tradition and call "the" an "article" (as I was taught at some point in my schooling), we have the interesting situation that some languages, even in the Indo-European language family, have no expressed definite article at all. Latin didn't have one, and Russian doesn't have one. Definite reference in Latin, in Russian, and in many non-Indo-European languages (all the various Sinitic languages that are jointly called "Chinese" immediately come to mind) is indicated by means other than a dedicated word such as "the." Because languages can do perfectly well without words like "the" and "a" as those words are used as articles in English, perhaps it is not so shocking that modern grammarians prefer different category names for those words. My eighth grade English class was innovative in that it used a textbook based on phrase-structure transformational grammar to teach me a lot of my English grammar. I would be glad to see books like that (modernized based on further linguistic research since the 1960s when the book was published) used in classrooms today. The "traditional" grammar poorly taught in the United States is based on an Indo-European grammatical tradition that is not completely lousy for teaching native speakers of Latin how to read and write Greek, but it has never been well suited for teaching analysis of English to native speakers or foreign-language learners of English. English has many grammatical features that are poorly described by the grammatical traditional of school lessons in English-speaking countries. For further reading on this point, see Steven Pinker's excellent new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.[1] For a better than average treatment of this point on Wikipedia, see the article "English language,"[2] which was updated to "good article" status during the most recent Wikipedia Core Contest, and is actually pretty decent for a Wikipedia article, with lots of references to good-quality reference books about the English language. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons/dp/0670025852 http://www.amazon.com/The-Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons/dp/06... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language
Animats 11y ago
This was resolved years ago in the linguistics community. There are open-class words, which in English are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. New open-class words can easily be added to the language. There are closed-class words, about a hundred of them, although opinions differ on this.[1] Some lists have "the" as a closed-class word, others have it as an an adverb. Closed-class words are treated like keywords in programming languages. The list seldom changes, and it's necessary to know the closed-class words, but not the open-class words, to parse a sentence. (At least in formal English.) While there are taxonomies of the closed-class words, modern thinking is that they're all handled as special cases. [1] https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/English_vocabulary_list https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/English_vocabulary_list
- philsnow 11y ago
  I would argue that "the" is a determiner, and the class of determiners is mostly closed. A determiner is the root of a determiner phrase. A determiner phrase can consist of only the root, like "the" or "a", but it can also be more complex like "every other", "uncomfortably few", or "90% of". (This is all from chomsky's x-bar theory [0], which dates back to the 60s. I'm not aware of another model of syntax that better captures reality, but I'd love to hear about such.) So the class of determiners is probably closed, but the class of determiner phrases is not (because phrases like "fewer than five of", "fewer than six of", etc are "generative" i.e. you can generate as many as you like). I could absolutely conceive of a situation where a certain determiner phrase gets used so much in a community that an abbreviation becomes accepted as a new determiner. Perhaps parliamentary procedure buffs, who (say) care about 2/3s majority just as much as simple majority ("most"), come up with "tooths" meaning "at least two thirds of", and it becomes accepted as jargon within that community. Could totally see it happening. In fact, if anybody knows of any such instances I'd love to hear about them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_theory
  - unhammer 11y ago
    Well, you've got https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_functional_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_functional_grammar and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-driven_phrase_structure_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-driven_phrase_structure_g... which are both model-theoretic grammars (see http://www.researchgate.net/publication/220718697_On_the_Distinction_between_Model-Theoretic_and_Generative-Enumerative_Syntactic_Frameworks http://www.researchgate.net/publication/220718697_On_the_Dis... ). In short, grammar rules are constraints that have to unify in order to describe a grammatical utterance, instead of phrase-structure rules that generate sentences. And there are newer theories that are much more compatible with a probabilistic / data-oriented outlook, even combining this with the model-theoretic grammar: http://www.nclt.dcu.ie/lfg-dop/ http://www.nclt.dcu.ie/lfg-dop/ People into semantics seem to like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar which I never learnt much about. Oh and there's also the Meaning-Text theory, Relational Grammar and various dependency-based frameworks, Optimality Theory applied to syntax, … it goes on and on :)
Anderkent 11y ago
>(If you have pronoun as a part of speech, that would be a very clever answer, but you're going to have a lot of trouble convincing non-linguists of that.) Can someone elaborate on that?
kazinator 11y ago
Just because you can point to "the" and identify it as a complement or article doesn't mean you understand it and you're doing linguistics! See this recent submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836769 [Richard Feynman on the difference between being able to name something, and understanding.] Native-English-speaking children already know how to correctly use articles, without requiring a theory of what they are. Teaching English learners that "the" is an article will not by itself result in correct use; they will be able to name it as an article, yet continue to use it in ways perceived as incorrect by native speakers, and do so for decades to come, possibly. It doesn't matter whether we "the" a determiner, or whether we call it a blunx. If we don't know where in a sentence a particular English blunx must be used or else must be omitted, then we don't actually know what a blunx is! And if we don't know that, we probably don't even understand why certain words are classified together as blunxes and others are excluded from that category; we are just demonstrating rote memorization. Without using the word "determiner" or "article", tell me where to use 'the', where to use 'a', and when not to use them.

47 points by synesso 11y ago

iGoPro_HD 11y ago

I thought that I was the only one who was never taught this. Go public school system!

emidln 11y ago
You never covered articles?
- iGoPro_HD 11y ago
  Not in the depth that it should have been.
  - ilitirit 11y ago
    I don't think there's much you can say about them at high school level. All we were taught was that "the" is the definite article and that "a" is the indefinite article.

bane 11y ago

Part of the problem of course if the naive notion that you can fit words into a single grammatical category, like species in a taxonomy, while word usage ends up defying this simplification. The real problem is that taxonomic classification is rarely correct in nature.

hyperpape 11y ago
Reading this, I have no idea if you're saying it because you know how modern syntactic theories work and how they're developed or if you're just saying it because you thought it sounded good. Don't leave us hanging!
- bane 11y ago
  I'll be perfectly honest, I'm half-serious, half-drunk-posting. But on simple inspection, the idea that a word can fit into a single category is obviously wrong. So to generalize the idea, you have to assume that a word can fit into multiple categories. Biology is undergoing a similar transformation from simple "this animal looks kinda like this one" to genomics classification, which is revolutionizing the tree of living things used by biologists to organize living things. There's not really any reason why words, a biological artifact, have been correctly classified all along. Hell! A copy-editor neighbor and I have minor quarrels over the capitalization of college subject names. Trees are a specialization of graphs, and they're usually wrong. Just assume graphs to start with and your data will organize much better, even if the properties of the organizational metaphor aren't quite as nice.
  - hyperpape 11y ago
    Well, I share some of the instinctive scepticism about tidy theories of syntax/semantics. But I don't have any real reason to claim that they don't work. Syntactic theories aim to explain why particular sentences are grammatical or ungrammatical (in the judgments of native speakers). If you can accurately do that, then yes, you've put each word into one category (as far as making up grammatical sentences). So to say the kind of thing you're saying, you'd have to explain why the current research programs in syntax are misguided.
sethjgore 11y ago
That's true. Ask a simple group of 5 linguists and they all will give you different answers. This literally happened in a workshop we gave at a college months ago. Quite funny. While working on grmmr (green-bridge.org) we recognized that so many of us are densely confused when it comes to these metalinguistics. So we just stopped using knives that dissected (metalinguistics) words into words and went for friendlier marker (symbols and colors). We need to be reminded that a lot of it is just pretend and educated guesses, no absolutes. Markers seem to work better here than knives do when teaching and categorizing language grammar.
unhammer 11y ago
You may find http://www.amazon.com/Fuzzy-Grammar-Reader-Bas-Aarts/dp/0199262578/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1436174326&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Fuzzy-Grammar-Reader-Bas-Aarts/dp/0199... interesting

sethjgore 11y ago

"The deeper problem is the school tradition itself. It's a TRADITION, after all" Interesting point and I agree. Why are we identifying metalinguistics with words anyway? Why not just use symbols so we can actually compare them across languages? Is the tradition so inherently rigid and stuck to the written/spoken languages - rather than moving beyond words and use a system of symbols? The tradition obsufcates the universality of grammar and semantics by adding words atop words rather than simple symbolism. Doesn't this make internalization harder? You don't teach math just by numbers but also with symbols and real-world references. As for internalization and understanding what and where 'the' belongs...There has been astounding success in identification and understanding when metalinguistics is entirely removed and replaced with simple symbols like grmmr (http://green-bridge.org http://green-bridge.org). I've seen results upfront and it seems a non-word approach eases and solidifies linguistic understanding in ways far more profoundly than metalinguistics ever can. Teachers and students alike have said this system has taken away all the cloud of uncertainty in language grammar and semantics. If you are a linguist and you are interested in helping grmmr become a standard in the studies of metalinguistics, please do let me know! I'm the design partner of the company. We are eager to open source this knowledge into a simple but reliable notation. This system has been in use for over 20 years in classrooms, colleges, and adult education programs. It has been redesigned from bottom up in order to be as accessible and consistent as you would expect from a grammar categorizing system.

kmicklas 11y ago

Linguistics is the only field I can think of where the general public does not take seriously the knowledge of the experts (linguists).

umanwizard 11y ago
Climate science, evolutionary biology, ...
- sethjgore 11y ago
  Graphic Design
- Cushman 11y ago
  I actually think this comparison is quite apt. Like those others, the science of linguistics has become heavily politicized in the US, most notably regarding the validity of AAVE as a first language. Though I'd still argue linguistics has it worse. You don't really expect people in educated society to get into heated arguments with the 10-day weather forecast, or jump in to correct your "biology mistakes" while you're eating...
  - umanwizard 11y ago
    Spot on. Disdain for Ebonics is one of the last remaining ways in which it's considered acceptable in polite society to be blatantly racist.
sethjgore 11y ago
Probably because most of it is just useless to the general public? Metalinguistics isn't really the place for people to jump onto and use as the base to improve their language understanding. A lot of it is exceedingly jargon and thus completely inaccessible.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ScootyPuff2000 11y ago

alricb 11y ago

These days, in Quebec, French (as a first language) is taught using a more-or-less linguistically correct approach, with articles called determiners, dividing sentences into groups and using transformations to understand interrogative sentences. In my days we used a more traditional system, and the time we spent doing grammar analysis was very tedious; we only approached the subject in secondary school. These days they are taught to analyse sentences in 3rd-4th grade and up.

tedd4u 11y ago

I'm surprised the author has run in to so many that don't seem to have learned about articles. Isn't this one of the most basic topics in middle-school grammar? I'm pretty sure "the" is one of the most common words in the language after all. I was taught in 6th or 7th grade that "the" is the definite article. As opposed to "a" which is an indefinite article. For those that are fuzzy on the concept this is the best online reference I found: https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english-grammar/determiners-and-quantifiers/definite-article https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english-grammar/d...

sethjgore 11y ago
It is simple, yet a large percentage of the users misuse and misunderstand "the" on a daily basis. The existing instruction systems arent usually focused on teaching us grammar and semantics on an inutitive and experiential level where we understand completely the difference between a pen and the pen. The existing linguistic models aren't meant for comprehension but rather for identification. I believe this is why so many of us still misuse "the" grossly. Let's not jump on what is an "article" when explaining to e or just about any student, especially those who are trying to learn English! :)
hobo_mark 11y ago
So was I, and I'm not even a native speaker. Things like this and the countless typos I see every day make me question what on earth people are taught in school over there if not how to read and right (ha!). It's not like I had a fancy education or anything, I grew up in a mostly rural part of Europe with a (still today) shitty economy.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
SilasX 11y ago
As the article points out, it's not really "wrong" to say "the" is an adjective: it functions exactly like one! It's only wrong in the sense of violating one of two equally useful classification systems. And this error doesn't even bubble up to the level of miscommunication, the only real sense in which you can say someone's usage is incorrect! Remember, in everyday use, you don't directly observe word classification. So unless someone goes Archeresque and says "I saw the movie -- in which I of course mean 'the' to be an adjective", there's no sense in which that mistake is common either. With that said, I think there is a substantive, common misuse of "the", but it's not what the article describes. Rather, it's when people say eg "I went to the store", when the speaker and listener don't have a common reference point that would justify "definiteness". I've always felt these should be "a store", since there are so many they could be referring to. (It's fine when there really is only one store they could be referring to.)

marze 11y ago

The purpose of "the" is to reset the vocal tract to a neutral configuration, allowing the subsequent (and more arbitrary) word to be resolved more readily.

RaptorJ 11y ago
Are there words that function the same way in Chinese, Latin or Greek?
vfdva 11y ago
Source?

tokenadult 11y ago

The author of the submitted, um, article (blog post) didn't cover all the ground that could be covered on this issue, because it was an off-hand post. The previous comments here on Hacker News prompt me to bring up one more issue: even if we follow tradition and call "the" an "article" (as I was taught at some point in my schooling), we have the interesting situation that some languages, even in the Indo-European language family, have no expressed definite article at all. Latin didn't have one, and Russian doesn't have one. Definite reference in Latin, in Russian, and in many non-Indo-European languages (all the various Sinitic languages that are jointly called "Chinese" immediately come to mind) is indicated by means other than a dedicated word such as "the." Because languages can do perfectly well without words like "the" and "a" as those words are used as articles in English, perhaps it is not so shocking that modern grammarians prefer different category names for those words. My eighth grade English class was innovative in that it used a textbook based on phrase-structure transformational grammar to teach me a lot of my English grammar. I would be glad to see books like that (modernized based on further linguistic research since the 1960s when the book was published) used in classrooms today. The "traditional" grammar poorly taught in the United States is based on an Indo-European grammatical tradition that is not completely lousy for teaching native speakers of Latin how to read and write Greek, but it has never been well suited for teaching analysis of English to native speakers or foreign-language learners of English. English has many grammatical features that are poorly described by the grammatical traditional of school lessons in English-speaking countries. For further reading on this point, see Steven Pinker's excellent new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.[1] For a better than average treatment of this point on Wikipedia, see the article "English language,"[2] which was updated to "good article" status during the most recent Wikipedia Core Contest, and is actually pretty decent for a Wikipedia article, with lots of references to good-quality reference books about the English language. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons/dp/0670025852 http://www.amazon.com/The-Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons/dp/06... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language

Animats 11y ago

This was resolved years ago in the linguistics community. There are open-class words, which in English are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. New open-class words can easily be added to the language. There are closed-class words, about a hundred of them, although opinions differ on this.[1] Some lists have "the" as a closed-class word, others have it as an an adverb. Closed-class words are treated like keywords in programming languages. The list seldom changes, and it's necessary to know the closed-class words, but not the open-class words, to parse a sentence. (At least in formal English.) While there are taxonomies of the closed-class words, modern thinking is that they're all handled as special cases. [1] https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/English_vocabulary_list https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/English_vocabulary_list

philsnow 11y ago
I would argue that "the" is a determiner, and the class of determiners is mostly closed. A determiner is the root of a determiner phrase. A determiner phrase can consist of only the root, like "the" or "a", but it can also be more complex like "every other", "uncomfortably few", or "90% of". (This is all from chomsky's x-bar theory [0], which dates back to the 60s. I'm not aware of another model of syntax that better captures reality, but I'd love to hear about such.) So the class of determiners is probably closed, but the class of determiner phrases is not (because phrases like "fewer than five of", "fewer than six of", etc are "generative" i.e. you can generate as many as you like). I could absolutely conceive of a situation where a certain determiner phrase gets used so much in a community that an abbreviation becomes accepted as a new determiner. Perhaps parliamentary procedure buffs, who (say) care about 2/3s majority just as much as simple majority ("most"), come up with "tooths" meaning "at least two thirds of", and it becomes accepted as jargon within that community. Could totally see it happening. In fact, if anybody knows of any such instances I'd love to hear about them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_theory
- unhammer 11y ago
  Well, you've got https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_functional_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_functional_grammar and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-driven_phrase_structure_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-driven_phrase_structure_g... which are both model-theoretic grammars (see http://www.researchgate.net/publication/220718697_On_the_Distinction_between_Model-Theoretic_and_Generative-Enumerative_Syntactic_Frameworks http://www.researchgate.net/publication/220718697_On_the_Dis... ). In short, grammar rules are constraints that have to unify in order to describe a grammatical utterance, instead of phrase-structure rules that generate sentences. And there are newer theories that are much more compatible with a probabilistic / data-oriented outlook, even combining this with the model-theoretic grammar: http://www.nclt.dcu.ie/lfg-dop/ http://www.nclt.dcu.ie/lfg-dop/ People into semantics seem to like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_grammar which I never learnt much about. Oh and there's also the Meaning-Text theory, Relational Grammar and various dependency-based frameworks, Optimality Theory applied to syntax, … it goes on and on :)

Anderkent 11y ago

>(If you have pronoun as a part of speech, that would be a very clever answer, but you're going to have a lot of trouble convincing non-linguists of that.) Can someone elaborate on that?

kazinator 11y ago

Just because you can point to "the" and identify it as a complement or article doesn't mean you understand it and you're doing linguistics! See this recent submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836769 [Richard Feynman on the difference between being able to name something, and understanding.] Native-English-speaking children already know how to correctly use articles, without requiring a theory of what they are. Teaching English learners that "the" is an article will not by itself result in correct use; they will be able to name it as an article, yet continue to use it in ways perceived as incorrect by native speakers, and do so for decades to come, possibly. It doesn't matter whether we "the" a determiner, or whether we call it a blunx. If we don't know where in a sentence a particular English blunx must be used or else must be omitted, then we don't actually know what a blunx is! And if we don't know that, we probably don't even understand why certain words are classified together as blunxes and others are excluded from that category; we are just demonstrating rote memorization. Without using the word "determiner" or "article", tell me where to use 'the', where to use 'a', and when not to use them.