stubbs article (gle)

Re: to be or not to be... | Barry Walford | June 3rd, 2001

Yes, thanks for the intervention, Colin, before we all vanish up our own proverbials. My impression of the FND exercise is indeed that we are expected to recognise the issues (and that there are issues) and justify our response to them, not that we discover some "right" answer: in many instances, there clearly isn't one, only a position to take.

Regards

Barry Walford

Re: also struggling with FND Unit 6 | Stephan Hegglin | June 4th, 2001

Mary, just a quick reply.

In the context of a dialogue, should personal pronouns (me, you, we) be considered lexical or grammatical? Ex.: In "Nice to meet you" is "you" G or L? I myself tend to see it more has having extra-linguistic relevance, therefore L..

According to Bloor's explanation in the TDA module, all word classes consisting of a closed set (these are word classes with a limited word number) are regarded as grammatical words:

• determiner (the, that, those, such)

• auxiliary verb (have, be)

• modal verb (may, shall)

• preposition (to, of, in)

• intensifier (very, quite, rather)

• pronoun (I, them, this her, theirs)

• conjunction (and, but, since, because).

From my point of view, it is questionable whether numerals have more content meaning than pronouns. The distinction between closed and open sets has at least the advantage of being convenient.

Words which belong to the following word-classes are typically lexical words:

• noun (eg terms, contexts, place)

• lexical verb (eg used, continue)

• adjective (older, standard, lexical)

• adverb (with some exceptions - quickly, incomprehensibly, foxily)

• numeral (two, second, 29).

• 2. In a verbal group such as "stayed on", must the preposition be taken as a separate unit and classified as G? Or could we argue that it is a unit, therefore L?

I would argue it is a unit as it can be replaced by a verb bearing the same meaning in one word, like "remained".

How do you deal with infinitives? (He seems to be eager...) According to Stubbs, to would be G, and be can be either G or L. Must "to be" be regarded as a verbal group and therefore classified as L? Stubbs says that "be" is either one, but he fails to give concrete examples...

From what I have understood so far, "be" is only considered a lexical word when it can be replaced by another verb like "existed" and as such has full lexical meaning. (I would have liked to count the copular verb "to be" which is followed by an Intensive Complement (Bloor and Bloor p 49 and 59) to the lexical terms too.

How do you classify numerals (1, 2, 3, a couple, 1970, etc...)? I've put them as Lexical.

See above.

Are words like 'here' and 'now' (adverbs of time) L or G?

I'm unsure.

And it looked like such a simple exercise...- Maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill?

I hope it helps.

Stephan from sunny Switzerland

(Now that the clouds have disappeared again. We had heavy snowfall in the mountains, not just on the molehills).

FND Articles, Unit 6- Stubbs, Questions | Evi Scor | July 31st, 2001

Hi, everyone!

How are you getting on with your studying? I cannot concentrate because of the heat and the fact that summer holidays are on the foreground.

Anyway, I have read Stubbs' article, unit 6, twice and I have come up with some questions.

1 On page 28 he says that pronouns are grammatical words. On page 29, however, he says that pronouns are a mixed class on the test for lexical and grammatical words because they can have either extra-linguistic and intra-linguistic reference. The examples he gives are the following: In the question " who is he?", HE has an extra-linguistic reference, whereas in statement "My brother works in Sydney. He is a moron.", HE has an intra-linguistic reference. So, does this mean that in the first example He is considered to be a lexical word while in the second case it is a grammatical word?

2 "Auxiliary verbs are grammatical words." (Stubbs: 28) "Note that on this test, auxiliary verbs are L words (e.g. doing, being, having)" (Stubbs: 30) "I have listed GO here as a G word. It can be a main verb and an L word (I go to London), but it can also be an auxiliary and a G word (I am going to keep hens for a living.) (Stubbs: 31).

Why can't I understand it and I feel there is some kind of contradiction? Why isn't GOING {I am going to keep hens for a living} an L word since it is auxiliary and it has an inflection like BEING, DOING and HAVING? Is it a G word according to Stubbs because he regards AM GOING TO {BE GOING TO} as one auxiliary verb and consequently as one word instead of three words?

Some of you may find my questions rather confusing but I am not trying to make your life difficult. It's just that I am confused which is funny because when I read the article for the first time I believed that I had understood everything and I thought that the portfolio task was going to be a piece of cake!! But when I actually tried to do the first text I felt so indecisive about which class most of the words belong to that I felt like being in a maze!!!!

Bye!!

Evi Scor

Re: FND Articles- Stubbs | James Hobbs | August 1st, 2001

Hi Efrosini. There don't seem to be many takers for the Stubbs debate, so I thought I'd just chip in a word or two.

Most people (myself included) seem to get a bit confused/ bogged down with lexical density, and questions about Stubbs seem to appear every few months on this list. In earlier postings many shared the opinion that Stubbs contradicts himself in places. I don't want to get into the finer points of the article, as it's a long time since I read it in detail, but I'll just say two things:

1 The basis of the article is devising a formula for calculating lexical density that can be written into a computer programme. Stubbs himself seems to admit that the formula's not perfect (p.28 "There is a striking correlation among clusters of independent features, defined below, but the correlation is not perfect."). In his list of L & G items on p28 I don't think he's claiming that this classification is absolutely watertight. Rather, he's presenting it as a list of intuitions, with the rest of the article detailing tests to see if these intuitions hold true. I think (and I may be wrong here) that he's saying that although his formula's not perfect, we can accept a small margin of error in exchange for the convenience of being able to calculate lexical density at the click of a mouse.

2 The main point of the portfolio task is to comment on the problems you have in calculating the figures, so I suppose the more trouble you have, the more you have to write about!

Good luck!

James
Japan

Re: FND, Stubbs article | Tom Bloor | August 7th, 2001

Sorry my response is so late; I have just read your email (below) and am replying even though it is probably to late to be of much immediate use.

I fully endorse James Hobbs' general comments on the issue (tesptesolmsc 2/8/01).

No, it cannot possibly be the case that an exophorically referring pronoun is lexical and an endophorically referring one grammatical. Stubbs decides to treat personal pronouns as grammatical words even though he says they 'are a mixed class' because they have extra-linguistic reference. He has a number of criteria and where items meet criteria for both L and G, he has to make a decision one way or the other.

Pronouns have more G characteristics than L; if you look at the table on p33, you will see that it is only on this one criterion that they (sometimes) fail to be typical G words.

Adverbs are much trickier as some seem to be more typical of L words ('cleverly', 'swiftly', 'backwards', etc) and others of G words ('very', 'quite', 'rather', etc). This can perhaps be seen as a weakness in the classification of parts of speech rather than in the G/L distinction. 'Adverb' covers an excessively wide range of word types.

Tom Bloor