Microsoft Word Revised Syllabus Ver doc

Categorization and Binary Feature 
 
Category, a general term used in linguistic at varying levels of abstraction. At its most 
general level, categorization refers to the whole process of organizing human experience into 
general concepts with their associated linguistic levels, the linguistic study of this process in 
semantics overlaps with that of philosophers and psychologists. In the field of grammar, 
categorization refers to the establishment of a set of classificatory units or properties used in 
the description of language, which have the same basic distribution and which occur as a 
structural unit throughout the language. The term category in some approaches refers to the 
classes themselves, for example noun, verb, subject, predicate, noun phrase, verb phrase.
In scale and category grammar, the term is used primarily to refer to the notions of 
class, system, unit and structure, which the theory recognized as basic. In generative 
grammar, the set of phrase-structure rules in a grammar may be referred to as the categorical 
component that is that part of the base component the grammar which specifies such syntactic 
categories, as SNP + VP. Also in some models of generative grammar, the term category 
feature is used refer to a type of contextual feature.
Binary-Feature 
Binary-feature is a property which can be used to classify linguistic units, in terms of 
two mutually exclusive possibilities, such as in phonology the presence verses the absence of 
vocal-cord vibration, or lip-rounding. Binary feature are mainly major organizational 
principal of distinctive feature theories of phonology, where it is conventional to mark the 
opposition using +/- in square brackets. Binary features also established in grammatical and 
semantic analysis of lexical items within generative grammar, where the transcriptional 
convention is used. 
Binary or binarism, in this sense is relatable to the principles of binary coding used in 
information theory, but the status of such contrasts in language is often controversial, as it is 
not always clear whether the linguistic possibilities available in phonology, grammar and 
semantics are best seen as a series of binary-choices. 
A language is a structure in the sense that it is a net-work of interrelated units, the 
meaning of the parts being specifiable only with reference to the whole. In this sense, the 
terms structure and system are often synonymous as language is a structured system. This 
structure appears as categories in the analysis of grammar, in the form of nouns verbs, cases 
etc. The binary or binarism makes use of ‘information theory’ and through this binary 
opposition translation method was simplified. Thus, translation was ‘given’ a systematic 
methodology by structuralism.