Chinese has no morphology. So the relationship between part of speech and syntactic position has always been controversial. I studied a common verb. It's appearance in predicate position covers over 97%. It can also appears in subject, object, attributive position, but they together cover less than 3%. If we omit the impact from morphology and semantics, maybe frequency is the most important factor to determine a word's part of speech and syntactic position. Is there any similar study on English?
Chang Du,
The word order in English is much more strict than in Chinese, so saying what it's syntactic position is amounts to saying what part of speech it functions as.
Many words, however, have multiple uses as far as parts of speech. For instance, "up" can be used as many parts of speech.
Preposition: I moved up the street.
Adverb: The balloon soon went up.
Adjective: I used the up elevator.
Verb: The politicians upped the stakes.
Noun: He had his ups and downs.
Verb Particle: George blew up the building. = George blew the building up.
@ Glenn Bingham Thank you very much for your good suggestion. In fact, Chinese also has this kind of words like "up" in English. You are right that English doesn't have the problem to distinguish the relationship between part of speech and syntactic position. My concern is like this: for example, a basic English verb, "go", suppose that someday the inflections of "go" disappear, but you will still see it in subject position, object and predicate position. How can you identify the part of speech of "go" in these 3 positions? Do they belong to different parts of speech? Or Do they still belong to verb, but have dynamic porperties given by the syntactic position they are in ?
"That plan is a go" would be understood by native English speakers. We know "go" is used as a noun because the article (determiner) "a" will begin a noun phrase that has a noun as the head. (Note: "*That plan was a went" does not work.) This might be idiomatic, but can be found in speech and writing.
"Go quickly is what they need to do." OK. I have maneuvered "go" into subject position. The syntax requires a noun (in standard theory), but since "go" is modified by an adverb, in some sense it is still a verb. This sentence would be related (by transformation?) to "They need to go quickly" in which "go" is most certainly a verb following the infinitive marker and modified by an adverb. Therefore, in this case, "go" would have to be called both a noun and a verb (or to get more technical, the noun phrase would be a verb phrase) or else we must lighten the stipulation that all subjects need to be noun phrases. Note further that it is a subject by the criterion that the verb agrees in number with the subject: "Stay healthy and earn money are what successful people need to do." This coordination takes a plural form of the verb. [Where "and" means "and then," the singular seems better: "Eat quickly and leave town is what they need to do."]
Hmmm. Object position. "John said, 'Go quickly'" does not count because the object is being referred to, not used. "John waited for a go" would be like the first example.
Go as adjective? "Green is the go signal." No adverb or verb particle or preposition.
There is also the aspect that slang can expand on this concept. Using the example of "go": in American English slang there is the expression "you go girl", which is giving it the role of an adjective in the sense of saying the girl is great. Or in the case of 'get up and go' where it means assertive force or ability as a noun. Yet in Chinese, du to the lack of conjugation or many other gramatical constructs it needs to be noted that it is as a result also a far more contextual language. Furthermore, where inflection can infer different meanings on the same words and phrases, the tonal structure in Chinese spoken languages means that inflection should not be used lest one drastically changes the meaning. The split between a written and spoken form of a language is also far more pronounce between Chinese and western languages. I have to correct my not Chinese friends that I speak Mandarin and not Chinese but that I read and write Chinese and not Mandarin but taht Ispeak, read and write English, French and German.
@ Glenn Bingham : Thank you very much for offering so many wonderful examples. As a non-native speaker of English, your suggestion will help me greatly on my research.
your example "Go quickly is what they need to do" exactly represented the problem Chinese researchers are facing. Personally I agree with you that "go" here is both a verb and a noun. Usually, in English, we can still use infinite verbs and gerunds in subject position, and those uses are dominant in English. Some Chinese scholars suggest that those verbs in subject position are actually functioned as nouns, so all verbs in Chinese as a set is a subset of noun. And they suggest that it is the difference between English words and Chinese words. Isn't it ridiculous? It's true that verbs in subject function can act as a noun, both in English and Chinese, But does it mean that verb is a subset of noun? How can you comment on such an idea if somebody, very famous person, tells you that verb is also a subset of noun in English as it can function as a noun in subject position, and needn't change its conjugations?
...And in the words of my first logic professor, Mark Brown: "Any noun can be verbed, including the noun verb."
I'm sure there's heaps on this topic in the linguistics literature. Maybe start with ch 15 of David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopaedia of language.
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