24 Functional categories
From lexical categories to functional categories
Previously in the Morphology module, we reviewed the lexical categories of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. As we’ve started looking at phrases and sentences, however, you may have noticed that not all words in a sentence belong to one of these categories. Consider the sentence in (1).
| (1) | The spaceship will arrive in orbit very soon. |
Spaceship is a noun, and it is the head of the noun phrase [the spaceship] (we can tell because it could be replaced by a pronoun like it). But what category is the? Similarly, in this sentence arrive is a verb, orbit is a noun, and soon is an adverb, but what categories do will, in, and very belong to?
Words like the, will, in, and very belong to functional categories, which can be thought of as the grammatical glue that holds syntax together. While lexical categories mostly describe non-linguistic things, states, or events, functional categories often have purely grammatical meanings or uses.
Some of the most important functional categories that we’ll use in this chapter are described in this section. In some later sections other functional categories will be introduced—as we develop a syntactic theory, a lot of the action comes in identifying new grammatical functions, and figuring out how they map onto structure.
Determiner
You may be familiar with the definite article the and indefinite article a(n), as in the book or a cat.
| (2) | a. | the book |
| b. | a cat |
In English, these occur in noun phrases before the head noun, as well as before any numbers or adjectives, as we see in the examples in (3):
| (3) | a. | the three red books |
| b. | a large angry cat |
In fact, determiners are usually the very first thing in a noun phrase, and you can only have one of them (unlike adjectives, which you can pile up). If you try to have more than one, the result is ungrammatical, as we can see in (4)—for me it’s not grammatical to say *a the book or *the a cat.
| (4) | a. | *a the book |
| b. | *the a cat |
This distribution doesn’t apply only to the and a(n), though. These other things aren’t articles in traditional grammar, so we use the label determiners for this larger functional category.
Some other determiners:
- Demonstratives (this, that, these, those)
- Some quantifiers (every, some, each, most, etc.)
Test for yourself that these occur in the same places in noun phrases as the and a(n) do—and that some other words expressing quantities (like all and many) and numbers do not.
Possessors in English expressed by possessive pronouns or by noun phrases marked with ‘s also appear in the same position as determiners, and are also in complementary distribution with them, as shown in (5).
| (5) | a. | my book |
| b. | [a friend from school]’s cat | |
| c. | *the [a friend from school]’s cat | |
| d. | *[a friend from school]’s the book |
Notice that the marker ‘s attaches to the whole phrase, rather than to the head noun friend; this