I'm reading an article on Syntactic Categories and came across the following heading:
Syntactic categories are distributional not semantic
I believe the "syntactic categories" the author is referring to are parts of speech:
Noun
Verb
Participle
Article
Pronoun
Preposition
Adverb
Conjunction
I want to understand what the author means when she says the categories are "distributional".
At first, I was hung up on the distinction between the two words:
Syntax
Semantic
I came across another answer that helped me out:
In summary, syntax is the concept that concerns itself only whether or not the sentence is valid for the grammar of the language. Semantics is about whether or not the sentence has a valid meaning.
So in Plain English it seems the title is trying to say:
"Parts of speech are _______ but actually don't convey meaning."
The author uses the word "distributional" again later in the second paragraph as an adjective to describe the noun "properties" as in "distributional properties".
The questions
- What does it mean for a part of speech to be distributional?
- What are distributional properties?
'modifies a noun', 'can have a plural ending', 'finite set'
Can you elaborate on how those phrases you used describe"what position the word can fit in"
? I'm not seeing how modifying a noun or changing the suffix describes the position of a word. I also don't know understand what you mean by "finite set". That phrase doesn't appear in the article. Is the term "finite set" related to Chomsky Hierarchy (I also don't know what that is, I was just googling around to try to figure out what you're talking about)