Philosophy Dictionary of ArgumentsHome
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| Congruence: In linguistics, congruence refers to the agreement between different elements within a sentence, such as nouns and their associated adjectives or verbs and their subjects, in terms of features like gender, number, or case. It ensures grammatical consistency._____________Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments. | |||
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John Lyons on Congruence - Dictionary of Arguments
I 242 Def Congruence/Grammar/Lyons: (grammatical correspondence) of genus, number and case between verb and noun. (in all languages). The constituents are considered to be of equal rank, in contrast to the regimen, where the verb rules the "object" and the "subject" the verb (tradition). Congruence: between words of the same category Rection: (see below) between words of different categories. I 244 Congruence/Regimen/Modern Grammar/Lyons: new: here we describe the difference in the terms endocentric/exocentric. >Terminology/Lyons. Rection/Hockett: Rection can only be found in exocentric constructions. For example, ad urbem, differs distributionally from the constituents ad, and urbem. Congruence/Hockett: Congruence can be found in endocentric constructions, in a binding beyond hierarchical structures i.e. direct constituents, I 245 between certain predictive attributes and subjects. Congruence/Lyons: Congruence thus prevails both in endo- and in exocentric constructions e.g. un livre intéressant coincides distributionally with un livre, against this: Le livre est intéressant : (here too there is congruence between livre and intéressant) is exocentric, because its distribution differs from that of le livre on the one hand and that of intéressant on the other. >Distribution/Lyons. LyonsVsHockett: thus it is not true (as many have claimed) that a subject's number is determined by the person and the verb's number. What is also incorrect is (which is even more often claimed) that the subject and not the verb determines or vice versa, that rather subject and verb form a category that belongs to the construction of which they are members. Solution/Lyons: (see below) Numerus and person are nominal categories, which can be identified flexibly or otherwise somehow in the surface structure of the verbal complex. >Surface structure, >Deep structure. Tradition: expresses it this way: "The verb corresponds to the subject in number and person". I 245 Congruence/Subject-verb-congruence/context-independent/Lyons: Example (1a) The dog bites the man (1b) The dog bites the men I 246 (1c) The dogs bite the man (1d) The dogs bite the men (2a) The chimpanzee eats the banana usw. Context-independent Grammar/Lyons: e.g (1) ∑ > NP sing + VP sing or NP plur + VP plur. (2) VP sing > V sing + NP (3) VP plur > V plur + NP (4) NP > NP sing or NP plur (5) NP sing > T + N sing (6) NP plur > T + N plur (7) N sing > N + 0 (Zero) (8) N plur > N + s (9) V sing > V + s (10) V plur > V + 0 More than one symbol is replaced at a time. Lexical Substitutions/Lyons: here we assume that their rules are outside grammar. >Lexicon, >Grammar. I 247 Congruence/context-dependent grammar/Lyons: Suppose we want to take into account the fact that the subject's number determines the verb's number. I 248 We follow approximately Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures" (N. Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, Berlin, New York 1957): (here still without transformational rules): (1) ∑ > NP + VP (2) VP > Verb + NP (3) NP > NP sing or NP plur (4) Verb > V + s/in the context NP sing + ... or V + 0/in the context NP plur + ... (5) NP sing > T + N + 0 (6) NP plur > T + N + s New: Here we get along with only 6 instead of 10 rules. New: It completely disappears that the noun is the carrier word of the nominal complex. Context dependency: N.B.: according to rule (1) all sentences created by these rules are of the same type (NP + VP). Rule (3): The number becomes a category of the nominal complex, regardless of whether it occurs as subject or object. Rule (4): The number in the verb is determined by the preceding nominal expression. That depends on the context. N.B.: in this way the rule can only be formulated in a system of concatenation rules (see above I 212: linear). The nominal expression on the left determines the congruence, not the expression on the right. I 249 Subject/object: since the left-standing nominal complex is derived from the NP created by rule (1), it can be interpreted as a subject and not as an object. >Transformational grammar, >Transformation rules._____________Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition. |
Ly II John Lyons Semantics Cambridge, MA 1977 Lyons I John Lyons Introduction to Theoretical Lingustics, Cambridge/MA 1968 German Edition: Einführung in die moderne Linguistik München 1995 |
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> Counter arguments against Lyons
> Counter arguments in relation to Congruence
Ed. Martin Schulz, access date 2024-04-19