Tag Archives: grammatical categories

Updating our grammatical typology

We now have the following categories in our grammatical taxonomy:

  • determinants
  • nouns
  • pronouns
  • verbs
  • prepositions and postpositions
  • determinant modifiers
  • noun modifiers, i.e. adjectives
  • adjective modifiers
  • verb modifiers, i.e. adverbs (but in a restricted sense with regard to classical grammar)
  • adverb (still in a restricted sense) modifiers

To be noted: the classical category of adverbs comprises here the following categories:

  • adjective modifiers
  • verb modifiers
  • adverb modifiers

The status of adjective modifiers

What is the status of adjective modifiers (tant, tout juste, un rien, un tantinet, très, extrêmement, … = so much, just a little, a little, a little, very, extremely, …) in the present grammatical typology? Adjectives are defined as noun modifiers. So adjective modifiers would be modifiers of noun modifiers? This sounds intriguing. In reality, we do not have the concept of ‘modifiers of modifiers’. In fact, we have the following rules:

  • a verb modifier followed by a verb is a verb
  • a determinant modifier followed by a determinant is a determinant
  • and generally speaking, a modifier of an X followed by an X is an X (where X is a given grammatical type)
    So a noun modifier followed by a noun is a noun, i.e. an adjective followed by a noun is a noun. For example: ‘un très beau livre’ (a very nice book), where ‘very’ is an adjective modifier, ‘nice’ is an adjective, i.e. a noun modifier, and ‘book’ is a noun.
    Hence finally, ‘an adjective modifier is a modifier of a noun modifier’ reads as follows: an adjective modifier is a modifier of [noun modifier].

New: Part-of-speech tagger for French language API

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