Once more on linguistic categories (original) (raw)

HOW UNIVERSAL ARE LINGUISTIC CATEGORIES

From the arbitrary (though sensible) definition of language as " (phonic) system used to say something about someone or something " it follows that to say (i.e. to predicate) something about someone or something (i.e. about entities or states of affairs conceived in our mind) belongs to the basic activities of our brain. In Edward Sapir's words «There must be something to talk about and something must be said about this subject once it is selected» (Sapir 1921; repr. 1949: p. 119). If we understand the Aristotelian terms hypokeímenon and katēgoroúmenon (Lat. subjectum and praedicatum, respectively) not in the grammatical meaning they acquired in the Western grammatical tradition but, in a functional sentence perspective, as 'topic' and 'comment', or 'theme' and 'rheme', we may affirm that they constitute the basic sentence structure, the essential part for the semantic interpretation of the sentence. Consequently, many linguists see NOUN and VERB as universal categories that all languages must have. But the discussion concerning whether the distinction NOUN/VERB is valid everywhere, for instance among the Iroquoian languages, is far from being settled. At the other end of the extant typological structures, the same could be said for the so-called precategorial languages of South East Asia, in which the functional value of a word (and hence its categorial status) is often determined only by its syntactic context (see Walter Bisang's many contributions on the subject). We need multiple criteria in order to assign a category to a lexeme, or better, a given lexeme to a category. Accordingly, the present paper tries to make a distinction between semantic function and morphosyntactic functioning of words and shows that both viewpoints are necessary and complementary to define the linguistic status of a word. The concept of 'tertium comparationis' will help to clarify the point.

When Can a Language Have Nouns and Verbs? (2003)

Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 35, 7-38. (Acta Linguistica Hafniensia International Journal of Linguistics), 2003

Whereas in most languages nouns and verbs are distinct lexical categories, there are also languages like Samoan, in which such a distinction does not seem to serve any descriptive purpose in the grammar. This contribution is an attempt to discover what distinguishes languages in which nouns and verbs are separate word classes from languages without a rigid noun/verb distinction. I will argue that transitivity plays an essential role in the parts-of-speech systems of languages across the globe in that a language can only have distinct classes of nouns and verbs if a subgroup of the basic lexical items in a language are semantically coded as designating a transitive relationship. There is a difference, however, in that the presence of a set of transitive items in the basic lexicon is a necessary and sufficient condition for a language to have a major, distinct class of verbs, but only a necessary condition for a language before it can have a major, distinct class of nouns. Ultimately I will argue that a language can only have distinct classes of verbs, nouns, and adjectives if the basic meaning of lexical items somehow encodes the prototypical properties of temporal and spatial entities (events and things). The prototypical event is an activity that involves an agent and a patient; the prototypical thing is a concrete object. Thus, a language can only have major, distinct classes of verbs, nouns and adjectives if the lexicon contains (a) items that designate a dynamic relationship between an agent and a patient, and (b) items that designate a property that is specified as having a boundary in the spatial dimension.