The Typology of Parts of Speech Systems

This book presents rigorous and criterial definitions of the major parts of speech - noun, verb, and adjective - that account both for their syntactic behaviour and for their observed typological variation. Based on an examination of languages from five different groups - Salishan, Cora, Quechua, Totonac, and Hausa - this book argues that parts of speech must be defined by combining the criteria of syntactic markedness, which characterizes lexical classes in terms of unmarked syntactic roles, and semantic prototypicality, which delimits their prototypical meanings. Adjectives are shown to be the marked (and, hence, most variable) class because of their inherent non-iconicity at the semantics/syntax interface. The four-member typology of parts of speech systems (languages with three open classes, those that group adjectives with verbs, those that group adjectives with nouns, and those that conflate all three) current in the literature is easily generated by free recombination of these two criterial features. Closer examination of the data, however, casts doubt on the existence of one of the four possible language-types, the noun-adjective conflating inventory, which is accounted here for by replacing free recombination of semantic and syntactic features with an algorithm for the subdivision of the lexicon that gives primacy to semantics over syntax.

Beck, David

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Note on phonological transcriptions Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Definitions of lexical classes 2.1 Semantic characterizations 2.2 Morphological diagnostics 2.3 Syntactic distribution 2.4 Extended roles and syntactic markedness 2.4.1 Criteria for markedness 2.4.2 WFM and markedness 2.4.3 Rigid versus flexible languages 2.4.4 Measures of contextual markedness: De- and recategorization 2.4.5 Markedness and prototypical mappings 2.5 The semantics of parts of speech 2.5.1 Prototypicality and peripherality in lexical classification 2.5.2 Semantic NAMEs 2.5.3 Semantic predicates 2.5.4 Property concepts 2.5.5 HUMAN CHARACTERISTICS 2.5.6 Why semantic NAMEs are not linguistic predicates 2.5.7 Non-prototypical semantic predicates and implicit arguments 2.6 Syntactic markedness and semantic prototypes Chapter 3 Semantics, syntax, and the lexicon 3.1 Some basic terminology 3.2 Lexicalization and syntactic structure 3.3 Adjectives, markedness, and iconicity 3.4 Relations between semantic NAMEs: Attribution and possession 3.5 Minor lexical classes Chapter 4 Types of lexical inventory 4.1 Verb-Adjective conflating inventories 4.1.1 Noun, verb, and adjective in Salishan 4.1.1.1 Nominal predicates and nominal actants 4.1.1.2 Verbs as actants 4.1.1.3 Verbs as unmarked modifiers 4.1.1.3 Verbs as unmarked modifiers 4.1.2 Cora 4.1.2.1 Modification and relative clauses in Cora 4.1.2.2 Nouns and modification in Cora 4.1.2.3 Flexibility and rigidity as syntactic parameters 4.2 Noun-Adjective conflating inventories 4.2.1 Quechua 4.2.2 Upper Necaxa Totonac 4.2.2.1 Property concepts in Upper Necaxa 4.2.2.2 Adjectives and nouns as syntactic predicates 4.2.2.3 Adjectives as actants 4.2.2.4 Nouns as modifiers 4.2.2.5 Secondary diagnostics: Quantification and pluralization 4.2.3 Hausa 4.2.4 The N[AV] inventory reconsidered Chapter 5 Conclusions References Index