3 ms·

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 becau

• 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.