jbn@GLACIER.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle) (08/03/88)
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 88 20:16 EDT
From: John B. Nagle <jbn@glacier.stanford.edu>
Subject: English grammar
To: AILIST@ai.ai.mit.edu
I understand that there is an approach to English grammar based on
the following assumptions.
1. There are four main categories of words, essentially nouns,
verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. These categories are
extensible; new words can be added.
2. There are about 125 "special" words, not in one of the four
main categories. This list is essentially fixed. (New
nouns appear all the time, but new conjunctions and articles
never.)
Does anyone have a reference to this, one that lists all the "special"
words?
John NagleHILLS@reston.unisys.COM (08/26/88)
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 88 17:42 EDT
From: HILLS%reston.unisys.com@RELAY.CS.NET
Subject: Re: English Grammar
To: ailist@mc.lcs.mit.edu
X-VMS-To: IN%"ailist@mc.lcs.mit.edu"
In AI List V8 #35 John Nagle described a grammar which divided words into
four catagories and requested a reference for the list of 'special' words.
This may be related to the work of Miller, Newman, and Friedman of Harvard.
In 1958 they proposed that words should be divided into two classes which they
defined as follows:
We will call these two classes the "function words" and the "content
words". Function words include those which are traditionally called
articles, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, and auxillary verbs,
plus certain irregular forms. The function words have rather specific
syntactic functions which must, by and large, be known individually
to the speaker of English. The content words include those which are
traditionally called nouns, verbs, and adjectives, plus most of the
adverbs. It is relatively easy to add new content words to a language,
but the set of function words is much more resistant to inovations.
The list of function words is included in the book: 'Elements of Software
Science' by Maurice H. Hallstead, Elsevier, 1977. This list contains about
330 words. I suspect that the list of 'special words' sought by Nagle is
contained within this list of function words.
-- Fred Hills