🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <memo.851485@cix.compulink.co.uk>, petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
(Peter Christian) writes:
|> In-Reply-To: <C0IEnu.Ew4@inews.Intel.COM> bongalon@tcad05.intel.com
(Ben Bongalon)
|> 
|> > 
|> > Where can I find references for the names of part-of-speech
|> > subclasses.  For example,
|> > 
|> > for Nouns,
|> >    (subject,object)     ???
|> >    (common,proper)      ???
|> >    (singular,plural)    case(?)
|> > 
|> >    Verbs,
|> >    (past,present,future)        tense(?)
|> >    (singular,plural)            case(?)
|> > 
|> >    ...etc.
|> 
|> If this is a not a language-specific question, I'm not sure there is
|> an answer (well, there might be some really abstract stuff in the
|> literature on linguistic universals).

English-specific.

|> If it's a question about English, you might look at Geoffrey Leach,
|> S. Greenbaum & Jan Svartik (I think that's right) _A Grammar of
|> Contemporary English_ (*very* detailed, lots of tables for
|> clarification) or something similar.

Thanks for the reference... May be a bit voluminous for my purposes
but I'll look into it. (pls see below)


|> But there are really three different things implied by your examples:
|> 1.  common/proper noun divides nouns into two *categories* on the basis of
|>     their syntactic behaviour, whereas
|> 2.  singular/plural distinguishes between different *forms* of the
|>     same word, while
|> 3.  subject/object distinguishes between different syntactical
|>     *functions*.
|> I think most linguists would understand `sub-classes' to refer to
|> only the first of these, since only in that case are the sub-classes
|> mutually exclusive. You'll need to look at a reasonably anlytical
|> grammar for that sort of thing (see above!), and it should also have
|> all the other stuff, too.
|> Perhaps if you could explain what you need the terms for, it would be
|> possible to be more helpful.

I plan to use the different "attributes" to classify words during the
parsing phase of a program that I have been developing (natural language
processor).  For example, the sentence: "John is tall" will be parsed
as follows:

John:	part of speech = noun 
	??? = singular 
	??? = proper

is:     part of speech = verb
	??? = singular
	tense = present

tall:	part of speech = adj

Obviously I can label the attributes to whatever I want but it would
be nice if my terminologies are consistent with that of the linguistic
community.

Thanks again for the help.

Ben Bongalon