XXXVII. The distributional model

The distributional model was offered by the American linguist Charles Freez in his work “The structure of English”. According to this pattern the sentence is defined as a certain succession of words belonging to certain sets (parts of speech) and used in certain forms.

The old man saw a black dog.

1a2d1b

D3 he - D3 he/she/it

where: D – determiner of the noun

3 – adjective

1 – noun singular, m

he

2d – verb in Past Tense

-

1 - noun singular, m,f,n

he,she,it

4 – adverb

a, b – marks above 1 point out that given nouns have different denotates, i.e. objects.

Freez’s pattern makes it possible to express the sentence structure from the point of view of distribution of certain forms of certain parts of speech in speech chain.

The fault of this model is that it reveals the succession of words, but not the real syntactic ties between the words. That is why in terms of Freez’s pattern it is sometimes impossible to distinguish even rather simple constructions, which have different syntactic relations, but have the same formular in distributional pattern:

The police shot the man in the red cap. and The police shot the man in the right arm.

D 1a 2 – d D 1bf D 3 1a

+ + he F it

Distributional model is used in the IC model.

Glossary of the linguistic terms:

1. denotate – денотат, предмет или явление действительности, с которым соотносится данная языковая единица.

Additional reading:

Блох М.Я. «Практикум по теоретической грамматике англ.яз.» – стр. 332 - 335