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On the status of auxiliaries in notional grammar1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
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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.
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