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Project

Ambiguous words: mismatches between syntax and the lexicon.

It seems obvious why the sentence the cat played with the mouse is considerably better than the sentence the play catted with the mouse. Cat is a noun and play is a verb and we should use them as such. Using play as a noun and cat as a verb simply does not seem to work. Put differently, words seem to belong to a specific category and this category determines how the word is used. This view is commonly held in linguistics because it is straightforward: nouns are used as nouns, verbs are used as verbs, etc. More generally, the category of a word matches its use in the sentence. I will refer to it as the matching principle. One expects that if a principle is commonly held in a field that counter-examples are hard to find. This is not the case for the matching principle, however. Consider the following example: Thats so Madonna. The word Madonna is a proper name. According to the matching principle, we do expect that it can be used as an adjective.To include such examples in the theory, I will propose an alternative to the matching principle. I hypothesize that words mainly get their category from the syntactic structure.
Date:1 Oct 2012 →  30 Sep 2015
Keywords:Syntax, Lexicon, Morphology, Categories, Formal linguistics
Disciplines:Linguistics, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Other languages and literary studies