Labelled bracketing

Having looked at the characteristics of the major substantive/lexical and functional categories found in English, we are now in a position where we can start to analyze the grammatical structure of expressions. An important part of doing this is to categorize each of the words in the expression. A conventional way of doing so is to use the traditional system of labelled bracketing: each word is enclosed in a pair of square brackets, and the lefthand member of each pair of brackets is given an appropriate subscript category label to indicate what category the word belongs to. To save space (and printer’s ink), it is conventional to use the following capital-letter abbreviations:

Adopting the abbreviations in (70), we can represent the categorial status of each of the words in a sentence such as:

as in (72) below:

What (72) tells us is that the words journalist/politician/comments belong to the category N/noun, the to the category D/determiner, he to the category PRN/pronoun (though if personal pronouns like he are analyzed as D-pronouns, he would be assigned to the category D), any to the category Q/quantifier, experienced/unsuspecting/unguarded to the category A/adjective, sometimes to the category ADV/adverb, into to the category P/preposition, knows/manage/lure/making to the category V/verb, can/to to the category T/Tense-marker and that to the category C/complementizer. It is important to note, however, that the category labels used in (72) tell us only how the relevant words are being used in this particular sentence. For example, the N label on comments in (72) tells us that the item in question functions as a noun in this particular position in this particular sentence, but tells us nothing about the function it may have in other sentences. So, for example, in a sentence such as:

Thus, a labelled bracket round a particular word is used to indicate the grammatical category which the word belongs to in the particular position which it occupies in the phrase or sentence in question, so allowing for the possibility that (what appears to be) the same word may have a different categorial status in other positions in other structures.