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Towards a ‘notional’ theory of the ‘parts of speech’

John Lyons-1991-09-12-Cambridge University Press eBooks
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The purpose of this article is to initiate a discussion of the ‘parts of speech’ within the framework of generative grammar. The present writer has long been of the opinion that the traditional, ‘notional’ theory of the ‘parts of speech’ merits a rather more sympathetic consideration than it has received from most linguists in recent years and feels, with Chomsky (1965: 118), that ‘although modern work has, indeed, shown a great diversity in the surface structures of languages …, the deep structures for which universality is claimed may be quite distinct from the surface structures of sentences as they actually appear’, and that ‘the findings of modern linguistics are thus not inconsistent with the hypotheses of universal grammarians’. The distinction that is drawn by Chomsky between ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ structure was implicit in traditional grammatical theory and has been reasserted by a number of modern scholars (cf. also Hockett, 1958; Lamb, 1964b; Halliday, 1966c: 57; etc.). This d

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The purpose of this article is to initiate a discussion of the ‘parts of speech’ within the framework of generative grammar. The present writer has long been of the opinion that the traditional, ‘notional’ theory of the ‘parts of speech’ merits a rather more sympathetic consideration than it has received from most linguists in recent years and feels, with Chomsky (1965: 118), that ‘although modern work has, indeed, shown a great diversity in the surface structures of languages …, the deep structures for which universality is claimed may be quite distinct from the surface structures of sentences as they actually appear’, and that ‘the findings of modern linguistics are thus not inconsistent with the hypotheses of universal grammarians’. The distinction that is drawn by Chomsky between ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ structure was implicit in traditional grammatical theory and has been reasserted by a number of modern scholars (cf. also Hockett, 1958; Lamb, 1964b; Halliday, 1966c: 57; etc.). This d

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