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On the status of auxiliaries in notional grammar1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

John Anderson
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh

Extract

The major assumption of notional grammar is that the syntactic classes established for each language on the basis of their distributional properties are labelled on notional grounds: the denotata of the prototypical members of classes meet universal ontological definitions. For example, one might suggest that: ‘As far as nouns are concerned, the prototypical denotata are persons, animals, and other discrete physical entities…’ (Lyons, 1989: 161). Despite the work of Lyons (notably also 1966, 1977) and others, involving a tradition of some antiquity, adequate explicit definitions for the range of classes are lacking; much remains intuitive. This should not prevent us, however, from examining the syntactic consequences of the notionalist assumption. Nor, of course, should the existence of non-prototypical class members (such as nouns which denote non-physical entities or whose denotata are of limited temporal extension - see further below). What follows explores the consequences for a specific area of classification of one articulation of a notional theory.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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