When a linguist draws a line

No linguistic analysis can be carried out without distinctions. It is by virtue of distinctions based on semantic, syntactic, morphological, etc. criteria that linguists can make use of a set of terms denoting conceptually differentiated grammatical classes and categories. While most of these categories have clear, widely agreed on definitions and the distinctions by which one such category is kept apart from another are not questioned, many distinctions are not part of a general linguistic consensus. Linguists may have different opinions on whether a articular distinction is necessary or superfluous. We give several examples of different choices that linguists have made in English grammar (with respect the category (?) of demonstratives, the category (?) of intransitives, the category (?) of verb particles, ...) and what their motivations can be for lumping or splitting. Our aim is to illustrate that different linguistic theories can make use (to different extents) of different sets of categories which are defined on rather different grounds (e.g. grammatical position, syntactic form, or semantic role). We further demonstrate how, depending on the linguistic theory adopted, related grammatical phenomena may also be distinguished at different linguistic domains (syntax, semantics, pragmatics).

ISBN:978-4-7589-2154-1

Publication year:2010

Keywords:distinctions in grammar, when-clauses, intransitive verbs, gerund