Prototypical and non-prototypical grammatical categories

Another important distinction that must be made is between prototypical and non-prototypical examples of a grammatical category. We very often find for a given category a central core of examples sharing a number of grammatical properties, with other examples exhibiting some but not all of these properties: the core of examples having the full set of properties we will then regard as the prototypical examples. For example, secretary, friend and idea are prototypical nouns, ^here-as perseverance and wetness are not: they differ from the prototype in not entering into contrasts of 'number', singular vs plural. Thus secretary contrasts secre­taries but there is no plural for perseverance. Perseverance and wetness certainly have enough properties in common with secretary, friend, idea to justify their as­signment to the same part of speech, but the lack of number contrast makes them non-prototypical. A good deal further removed from the prototype is an example like umbrage " offence": this is now restricted to the idioms take umbrage and give umbrage, so that it is unable to enter into many of the grammatical relations that are characteristic of prototypical nouns. Not only is there no contrasting form ^umbrages, but we cannot have *this umbrage, *my umbrage, *the umbrage that had impressed us so much, and so on. (The asterisk, here and henceforth, indicates that what follows is ungrammatical, at least in the interpretation under con­sideration.) An example of a non-prototypical verb might be beware, as in Beware of the new boss. It is very different from a prototypical verb inasmuch as it does not enter into contrast with past and present tense forms - we do not have *He bewares/bewared of the new boss; there is nevertheless no doubt that it belongs to the part of speech 'verb' rather than to any of the others.

What such examples show is that grammatical likeness is often not an all-or-nothing matter but a matter of degree, and that we cannot expect to be always able to give a language-particular definition of a category in the form of a set of sufficient and necessary conditions for inclusion in the category - i.e. a set of properties such that an item will be included if and only if it has all the properties in the set. Instead we will often begin with definitions of the prototype and con­sider then how far beyond the prototype the category should be allowed to extend - and there may be a certain amount of indeterminacy or arbitrariness over precisely where the boundary should be drawn.

 

Study questions

1. Think of the examples of your own to explain the difference between the definitions of grammatical categories at the language-particular and the general levels.

2. Analyze the case system in English and in Ukrainian in terms of grammaticalisation.

3. Exemplify prototypes of English and Ukrainian

3.1 nouns;

3.2 tense forms;

3.3 adverbs.

 

Part 3

Sentence parsing

1. Charlie stands there watching her; even from this distance he can hear the creak of the chain as the swing moves, and then, for no reason at all, Charlie is afraid that his sister will look up and see him, so he takes off as fast as he can, and even though he feels certain he is heading in the wrong direction, he doesn’t stop until he is all the way home.

 

2. She will call an assembly, she’ll invite Ed Reardon to come, she’ll find a speaker from AIDS organization who specializes in education, she will not put this issue up for the school board to debate; their discussion of the assembly might drag on for weeks and her students need to know now what AIDS is and how they can and cannot be exposed.

 

3. Nearly every night after dinner, when the children are in bed, Ivan goes back to the Institute; none of his colleagues asks him any questions, they’re used to what anyone else would consider odd working hours; last year there was one graduate student from California everyone called Vampire – he worked only from nine at night until dawn, no one had ever seen him during the day.

 

4. Two girls Amanda sincerely hates, not just because they are snobs who won’t speak to anyone who doesn’t have pierced ears, come in as Amanda’s fixing her hair; everybody at Cheshire knows their names, Mindy and Lori; Mindy, who’s on the gymnastic team, had better leotards than anyone else, really neat ones that the grandmother sends her from LA.

 

5. Amanda herself is in good spirits, no one said anything awful to her, and her teacher, who Amanda thinks is too pretty and young to be a teacher, called her aside and told her that it was a pleasure to have her in class and that if she missed any time her work could be sent home to be made up.

 

 

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