EL SURGIMIENTO DE LAS ORGANIZACIONES OBRERAS

So far it has been understood that words play a central role in Word Grammar syntax. Yet, one might query how a word can be recognised without a clear definition of it. As we have observed, Word Grammar is a network theory in which concepts are interconnected with one another, with an ISA hierarchy being one m ajor sub-network. Within this organisation, any concepts including the concept ‘w ord’ are characterised solely by th e ir typical properties, any of which (thanks to default inheritance) can be overridden for handling exceptions. For instance, properties of the typical word would readily be listed: it has a sound pattern defined by normal phonology, it has the syntactic function of a dependent, and it has a meaning; but all of these properties allow exceptions - untypical phonological patterns in loan words, words which require no parent, and words without ordinary meaning. Hence th e concept ‘word’ could never be defined by articulating its necessary and sufficient conditions, nor could any other concepts.

So far as syntax is concerned, then, words are the essential units of syntactic structure. Furtherm ore these same words should also be the essential units of morphology, bearing in mind that they are the link between syntax and m orphology. The largest unit in morphology is a word which in tu rn is the sm allest unit in syntax. In addition to the word in syntax and morphology, it is however necessary to recognise at least another abstract concept of ‘w ord’ in the phonological sense. (I shall ignore the word in sem antics since it is not directly related to the research topic.) We shall call the form er ‘(m orpho-)syntactic word’ and the latter ‘phonological w ord’. The necessity for recognising two word-types is due to m ism atches such as those reviewed below, where syntactic word boundaries do not coincide with phonological ones.

4.2.1 The contracted forms of verbs

In the subsequent sections, we shall examine so-called clitics and compounds in English with regard to their statuses as syntactic words. The first case is the contracted forms of verbs, which are clitics. Take the following sentence containing the contracted form of ‘are’ as an example.

In phonology, (4.3) consists of two phonological words: /jo:/ a n d /siqkii]/, since the first cluster /jo:/ would represent no more than two phonem es if it were divided into the consonant and the vowel. In contrast, there m ust be recognised three syntactic words. In other words, the clitic, viz. the contracted form of the BE verb should be analysed as an individual word; 're in this case. If the cluster ‘you’re ’ is taken as one syntactic word, it will have to be analysed as though it were both sentence-root and subject. Hence, th e stru c tu re in th e rig h t in (4.3) will be syntactically illegal owing to an infringem ent of The Competition Principle: in surface structure, each word depends on no m ore than one word. The diagram below will illustrate this point.

(4.3)

s y n ta x You 're sinking. n:s v:s V:g

siqkir) phonology

u tte ra n c e s You're sinking.

S) s I Y ou're

n:s, v:s

4 .2 .2 The possessive ''s'

Along the same line as reduced forms of English verbs, there is an o th e r putative clitic: the possessive m arker " s ’. There are two positive motives for treating it as a separate syntactic word. Consider (4.4), (4.5) and (4.6) below.

(4.4) his g irlfrien d

(4.5) th e n eig h b o u r’s girlfriend

(4.6) th e neighbour living on the ground floor’s girlfriend

Prim arily, co m p arin g the first two exam ples, we can observe th a t ‘n eighbour’s’ in (4.5) has the function of determiner. It is therefore possible to regard the cluster in question as a compound of a common noun and a

pronoun. Nevertheless, this analysis is implausible since it fails to show a dependency relationship between the preceding noun and "s' in such group genitive cases as (4.6). Notice th at the possessor is not ‘flo o r’ b u t ‘the n eighbour’ in this example. Thus the possessive m arker ‘’s’ has the status of a syntactic word. The following diagram is the dependency analysis for (4.6), with two syntactic words corresponding to the single phonological word /floiz/.

(4.6)

th e n e ig h b o u r liv in g on th e ground floor 's g irlfrie n d

n:s N:s V:g P n:s N:s N:s n:s N:s

Thus far, the evidence has shown clearly th at such clitics as the contracted form s of verbs and the possessive ‘’s’ in English are independent syntactic words. In the following subsection, we shall investigate the rath er ambiguous case of a noun-noun pair that could be seen as either a compound constituting one syntactic word or a noun plus noun sequence comprised of two syntactic words.

4.2.3 Noun plus noun pairs

The noun plus noun pairs include compound nouns such as ‘black sh eep ’ and ‘blackmail’. Since some such pairs are w ritten with or w ithout a word space, they sanction two syntactic analyses: one syntactic word of a compound or two syntactic words composed of a noun-noun sequence. The pair ‘ground floor’ in (4.6) may well be a noun plus noun com pound especially when it d ep en d s on an o th e r noun; its spelling with a h y p h en reinforces this assum ption, e.g. a ground-floor flat. Moreover, occasionally th ere is an unclear case in which applying dependencies to the nouns within a p air is extremely awkward. For example, the dependency relation between ‘Apple Macintosh’ is ambiguous since both are the registered tradem arks and can be used independently. In the absence of sound m otivation for recognising two syntactic entities in this type of pair, we are left with two acceptable

syntactic analyses for it. Below are given two altern ativ e dependency analyses for ‘ground floor’.

(4.7a) (4.7b)

i

ground floor g ro u n d -flo o r

N:s N:s N:s

In term s of syntactic difficulty, what counts is not how noun plus noun pairs are syntactically processed but how much processing load they carry. Let us tu rn to the above examples, and assume th at the processing loads for the words ‘ground’, ‘floor’, and ‘ground-floor’ are x^, Xg, and x^, respectively. The sum of \ and x^ in (4.7a) should equal x^ in (4.7b), because both are the identical string of words. Thus, provided that the same am ount of processing load is assigned to both (4.7a) and (4.7b), the exact syntactic structure for ‘ground floor’ would not be of significance in processing difficulty.

Ultimately, the way compounds are processed would be determ ined by how they are related to their perm anent words in the isa hierarchy. If one has a node of sub-lexeme GROUND-FLOOR, then (4.7b) will be the more probable m anner for processing it, or else ‘ground’ and ‘floor’ will be processed as two separate words. How the noun-noun pairs are preserved in our brains may be different from one person to another, and from one pair to another. It is therefore, worth allowing alternative syntactic analyses for these pairs, while finding some other basis, independent of the syntactic analysis, for predicting processing difficulty.

(4.7c) w ords noun

T

Î

Î

T

ground floor ground-floor

Two ways o f accessing the stored words for the utterance ground floor. (4.7c) and (4.7d) correspond to the resulting syntactic structures of (4.7a) and (4.7b) respectively.