Syntactic Categories

Syntactic categories are defined by their distribution (environment) rather than just their meaning.

Diagnostic Environments

If a word fits the environment of a category, it belongs to that category:

• Nouns: Determiner ____ Verb (e.g., The cat ran)
• Adjectives: Determiner ____ Noun (e.g., The happy cat)
• Verbs: will/to ____ (e.g., I will go)

Lexical vs. Functional

• Lexical: Open classes (Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs). They carry most of the semantic content.
• Functional: Closed classes (Determiners, Conjunctions, Complementizers like that, if, whether). They perform grammatical functions.