Help with proving a lexical/functional category question

[kornv9022]

Hello everyone! I here today because I am very confused and stuck on two problem that we were given in linguistics class.
The problem goes like this. Determine if each -ing word is a noun, verb or an adjective and provide the necessary linguistical evidence to support your decision. 1 a. A frightening possibility.
So basically what we are expected to do is prove the category of frightening by discussing the lexical and functional categories in the phrase and their relationship between each other. Basically we say for example 'this word is a ....and is a lexical category. This word is a... which is a functional category. This category is a category that is allowed to precede this category and has a linear relationship with it. Therefore this word is a ....."
I am confused as to how to approach this problem. First of all is frightening the lexical or functional category? On our sheet and where I read it says that lexical categories are nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and functional categories are auxillary verbs, modal verbs, articles, demonstrative pronouns, and possessive pronouns. The problem is that the words that we need to use to prove this example are both in the lexical category. There is also 'a' in the sentence but it won't help us, unless we were proving that possibility is a noun. Next, in our note it says that you cannot prove a functional category via a lexical category and functional categories must come before lexical categories in English. To me it seems like frightening is functional category because it has a function of describing the noun and it comes before the noun. If that is the case then I wouldn't not be able to prove it because of the rule that functional categories cannot be identified via a lexical category. I feel like from the examples we did before it would make more sense to prove that possibility is a noun because of the determiner and adjective.

The next question is "an unexpected meeting". Again I am not so sure how to prove that meeting is a noun. Any thoughts on these two questions. I am really confused and my professors makes us feel dumb when we ask questions and swears a lot at us and is just very frightening. She also only comes into her office on Fridays when we have class and doesn't respond to emails so I can't ask her until Friday but we have a test coming up. I would like it if you explained in detail the answer and why it is like so, but you can just post what you think is correct if you don't have time.

[Daniel]

The -ing form in English is tricky because historically it comes from two sources (one in adjectival participles ["running man"] was originally -ende, which was contaminated [influenced] by the nominal gerund ["Running is fun"]), and now there are around 4 different uses of the suffix.

1. Deverbal adjectives = participles: "Running man"
2. Deverbal noun = action nominal, gerund: "Running is fun"
3. Deverbal adverb = converb: "Running, I entered the room."
4. Argument verb = infinitive: "I started running."
[You might consider 4 to be an instance of 2, which is fine, but there are also reasons for thinking of it as still fairly verblike, rather than a full nominalization.]
(We can paraphrase (1) as a relative clause; (2) as a nominal clause with "that", maybe roughly "That I can run"; (3) as a subordinate clause; and (4) as a complement clause [not easily in this example, at least in English, though an infinitival paraphrase is easy].)

These can all be considered types of non-finite verbs. And they're all deverbal in the sense that they're derived from verbs but now other parts of speech (with the exception of (4)). Additionally, they behave in some complicated ways in terms of word class (part of speech): internally they are like verbs (they can take arguments: "Running a race is fun.") but externally they behave like other parts of speech in terms of distribution (and a few things like the form of subjects: "His [*he/?him] running was fast.").

There's no real way to tell these forms apart on their own or based on their internal properties. For the most part you'll need to focus on distributional criteria. The most obvious one is substitution: would you substitute a noun, and adjective, an adverb or a verb for the word as it is being used in a particular context?

Typically we don't offer too much homework help here (we certainly won't do it for you) for two reasons: 1) you need the practice; and 2) the particular way your professor expects you to do the problem (the theory and diagnostic tools you've discussed) may be different from how we would do it.

So mostly for reason (2) you should look at what you've talked about in class to see HOW to answer these questions. But I hope that helps some.

As for a more technical discussion of some of these issues, this is a great paper getting into the details of the differences in different non-finite verb forms.
Ylikoski, J. (2003). Defining non-finites: action nominals, converbs, and infinitives. SKY Journal of Linguistics, 16, 185–237.
http://ansatte.uit.no/jussi.ylikoski/filer/defining.pdf

Remember: it's very important to distinguish between form and function, especially in English (though many or maybe most languages have some overlap between 2+ of the categories, see the paper above). So when I say that "start running" involves an infinitive, obviously I don't mean a form with "to" as in "start to run". I mean that the function is the same as that infinitival usage. The form is -ing in all of these cases though. We often (over)simplify descriptions of languages by assigning functional names directly to forms (like -ing as a "gerund suffix" or "participle suffix") but that obscures some of the complex mapping from form to function in languages! After all, it isn't the form itself that "means" anything. It's the fact that we use it in a particular grammatical context. And that means something. Not a problem when a form has just one function (and when nothing else shares it), so it's easy to overlook.