Re: Are contractions a part of speech?

From: Peter T. Daniels (grammatim_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 02/20/05 

Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 13:58:54 GMT

Greg Lee wrote:
>
> Douglas G. Kilday <fufluns@chorus.net> wrote:
> ...
> > One must be cautious arguing from mobility. Different adverbs have
> > different degrees of mobility.
>
> I was cautious. I implied that a characteristic of adverbs is occurrence
> in several positions, not that adverbs can be put any old place.
>
> ...
> > Someone here didn't eat any food.
> > Someone here did not eat any food.
>
> > I can't imagine "parsing" these differently.
>
> I don't know why. We agreed that "didn't" is one word but "did not" is
> two, didn't we? Doesn't that make it obvious that they're parsed
> differently?

Was a universal definition of "word" provided? (Or is your maxim "I
don't do definitions" to be applied here -- in which case your arguing
about "words" is vacuous?) 

-- 
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@att.net