Talk:Noun phrase

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents

[edit] italics/quotes

what's going on with that!? my wiki-fu isn't strong enough to go through and figure out what happened to the formatting here. also, possibly include a link to DP hypothesis?

[edit] merger

The article Nominal group (language) treats the subject from a functional or interpersonal view. The article Noun phrase has a more syntactic orientation. I think both approaches should be covered in wikipedia, and I think that there is enough to be said about both approaches to fill at least two pages.

It is possible to merge the two pages for now, but it might be necessary to de-merge them later. I will add some content to Noun phrase and see whether there is a nice logical place for the nominal group to fit in. Generally, care must be taken to not confound the lexical category noun, the syntactic category noun phrase and the discourse pragmatics act of reference. I think that Nominal group (language) is applicable on the discourse pragmatic level, whereas noun phrase is syntactic. A noun phrase can be headed by a pronoun for instance (at least in some theories), whereas this would not be possible for a nominal group as far as I can see. Jasy jatere (talk) 18:52, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

I suspect that the two articles cover such different (in some ways contradictory) views of nominalised units that they should be treated separately. I have no problem cross-linking them, if these two articles were merged, would that mean all system functional grammar articles should be merged with whatever the closest equivalent in traditional grammar? I think there'd be chaos. WP really does have the scope to give a thorough treatment of both, without buying into a tangled mess. Trad. and SF grammar are really at odds with each other in so many fundamental ways. Tony (talk) 11:10, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] category problems

Numerals and quantifiers perform exactly the same grammatical role. Why are they categorised differently? Same for articles and possessives, which both orient the subset (the head of the group) in terms of the speaker–now modality. Tony (talk) 15:13, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Numerals and quantifiers are different categories in many languages, including English. For instance, quantifiers can float, whereas numerals can't e.g. The boys all read the bible vs. *The boys three read the bible. Of course, both fulfill the function of indicating an amount, but that does not mean that they are grammatically the same Jasy jatere (talk) 11:48, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
articles and possessives are also different from one another, although in English they are quite similar. Italian and Portuguese for instance combine them to The my house, the your house. etc. Furthermore, some languages lack articles, like Russian, whereas none lack possessives. Last but not least, articles are used to indicate whether a referent is old or new, specific, categorial or generic, whereas possessives indicate, well possession, no matter the discourse pragmatic status of the referent. I agree with you that they perform some kind of function related to the speaker and the speech situation, but that does not mean that they are all alike Jasy jatere (talk) 11:48, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Nevertheless, I query the utility and logic of the current boundaries.
current boundaries are based on differences in morphology, syntax and semantics. The lack of difference in pragmatics does not invalidate these differences. Furthermore, these terms are well established in the discipline, and it would probably be original research to argue with that. At least the difference between article and possessives goes back to Dionysios Trax (100 BC).
Your posting raises another important issue: is this truly an article about the noun phrase in all languages? I hadn't thought about it, but your angle appears to accept that the scope should indeed be that wide.
that is indeed what I think.

It would be an interesting article, for sure, but how on earth to find the expertise and knowledge required for a reasonable expose in world languages?

there is a book by Jan Rijkhoff called "The Noun Phrase", which would make for a good start. There are loads of generative literature as well, for those who like it. The question is rather where to find the manpower to add this information to wikipedia
At the moment, the foreign language component seems to be just a token (one example and one stubby little section).
That can surely be improved. I wrote most of that page from memory in very short time, before that, it was even stubbier.
Another issue it that the whole article is inadequate in its breadth and depth, even just for English.
I assume you mean it is too short? I agree
These aspects further delineate the article from that on "Nominal group (language)", which announces its scope in its opening two words. Perhaps the title might have been "Nominal group (English)", but since the distinction between phrase and group, and all of the associated apparatus, have been almost entirely explored in our language, it seemed unnecessary. I inserted the parenthetical item, in any case, only to distinguish the article from "Nominal group", which was already taken by some psychological group love-in theory. Tony (talk) 12:06, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
I think there is space in wikipedia for at least 4 articles namely Noun Phrase, Noun Phrase (English), Nominal Group, Nominal Group (English). For the record, it was not me who made the merger proposal, I just created the discussion section (which was lacking) and advanced some arguments. I am perfectly fine with the two articles staying separate. Jasy jatere (talk) 12:53, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
OK, I'll remove the tags. What do you think of the system functional approach, in any case? It's also incomplete, but I think at the moment the article is OK as a stand-alone, until it's expanded. Tony (talk) 10:10, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
I think the NomGr article is a much better article than the NPhr article as of now, if that is what your question is about. I am not too familiar with SFG, so I do not really know what I think about it ;-). I like the interpersonal approach it takes, but it seems to focus less on syntactic details than other theories Jasy jatere (talk) 13:23, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
  • By "syntactic", do you mean "word order"? If so, I'm unsure I understand. Tony (talk) 14:02, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Determiner phrases?

I'm no linguist, but I do have a question. Currently, the article contains a sentence beginning "That noun phrases can be headed by elements other than nouns — for instance, pronouns (They came) or determiners ((I'll take these)).....". As far as I know, all pronouns function syntactically exactly as nouns, so I really don't see why this "difference" needs to be highlighted. Also, the second part of this claim interests me, namely that "I'll take these" contains a determiner. It is "I'll" that is currently in bold font - "I'll" stands for "I will", "I" being a personal pronoun and "will" an auxiliary verb, so no determiners there.. I'm also guessing that the author might have actually meant the word "these", but in this sentence this word is actually a pronoun rather than a determiner (compare with "I'll take these books", where "these" is a determiner, specifying "books"). It is similar with the word "his" - in "This car is his", it is a possessive pronoun, in "This is his car", it is a determiner, and it can be argued that these are different words that are homographs. So it seems to me that for this claim to be made (that noun phrases are sometimes seen as determiner phrases), better examples should be brought. Taavi23 (talk) 23:59, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

You were right about the boldface, I changed it to highlight "these", as intended. DP hypothesis is standard in Generative linguistics, but not accepted elsewhere. The argumentation is very theoretical (and not very convincing to me), and probably impossible to explain to laymen (Hey, even linguists struggle with it). So, why not take it out? Well, because it has become the standard in generative theory. How such an unintuitive hypothesis could become so popular, only god knows. Jasy jatere (talk) 11:02, 31 March 2008 (UTC)